


More 
Little 

Beasts 

of 
FIELD 

and 
WOOD. 

I William Everett Cram] 




ran* (pL ja/ 

Boo* C g> 



GopyrigW' . 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



More Little Beasts 
of Field and Wood 




HARES IN THEIR FORM, OR SLEEPING PLACE 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 
OF FIELD AND WOOD 

William Everett Cram 




Boston 
Small, Maynard and Company 

Publishers 



Copyright, 19 12 
By Small, Maynard and Company 

(incorporated) 

Entered at Stationers* Hall 






THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



>C!,A3284 J9 



Preface 



MEN who dwell in the forest are much 
given to superstition. It may be that 
this should be enclosed between quotation 
marks, for, while the wording may vary, the thought 
itself is as old as truth. That which to one is 
superstition, to another is merely to believe in all one 
sees or has reasonable evidence for believing, whether 
these things happen to be in compliance with the 
known laws of science {regarding matter) or are con- 
trary to them. For one who has but a passing ac- 
quaintance of life in the woods and wishes to acquire 
the ability to observe Nature, I would offer this 
suggestion. Get a copy of Shakespeare s Midsummer- 
Night's Dream illustrated by Arthur Rackham and 
study carefully the drawings. In this way, better 

vii 



PREFACE 

than in any other I believe, will he get an idea of 
what he must train his eye to see. 

The untrained eye sees only these birds and beasts 
and insects which, either through lack of fear, con- 
tinue the activity of their daily life undisturbed by 
his presence, or else, because of fear, make themselves 
conspicuous in flight. After he has passed them by, 
many a contorted root or knot or mossy, lichen-cov- 
ered stone or stump relaxes its rigidity and, shaking 
out its fur or feathers as the case may be, goes about 
whatever it may have been interrupted in by his 
approach. The trained eye and that of the born 
observer peers searchingly through the shadows 
without conscious direction from its owner; dwells 
long on withered leaves and lines of bark without 
knowing why some one -particular object holds it, 
until, under its gaze, a leafless bough changes to the 
antlers of a deer, a distant speck of light or shadow 
advances to combine with shimmering leaves and 
form the mottling on an owV s wing; a mossy stump 
discovers eyes and ears and, at his nearer approach 

viii 



PREFACE 

bounds off a frightened hare or lynx. He may gaze 
down through still water at fish and water beetles 
swimming there until the warier ones, unseen be- 
fore, resume their wonted shapes again and, where he 
saw but wet reed stems or pellucid wavering water 
shadows, is now a living, active thing which passes, 
it may be, too near a certain mud-buried, old, slimy 
stone that seizes it with sudden, outstrecthed, gaping 
jaws and backs away, down into deeper water, amid 
all the roil and confusion it has created in gaining 
its dinner. 

A terrified rabbit dashes past over new snow 
leaving, as it goes, its trail of footprints, and follow- 
ing with these are smaller tracks in widely separated 
pairs, yet the eye keen enough to see these, even as 
they form, sees not the snow-white ermine making 
them invisible, save for the one black tuft of fur, 
as if it were the very spirit of the forest itself 
Is it to be wondered at if, seeing these hundreds 
of apparently impossible things occurring repeatedly 
in his daily walks, the inhabitant of the forest 

ix 



PREFACE 

learns to believe, or at the least dares not to dis- 
believe in anything for which he has the evidence 
of his own eyesight, or the agreeing testimony of 
men of different tribes and races during the past and 
present ages in the short time that men have lived 
upon the Earth? 



Introduction 



TH E purpose of this book is not so much to 
instruct or give information of the ways 
and private lives of our wild animals ', as 
it is to encourage all natural interest in such mat- 
ters in order that those who have the inclination and 
the time may be helped to find out for themselves and 
so encourage the habit of acquiring at least a portion 
of their knowledge at first-hand. 

For all knowledge and learning of whatsoever 
sort that we may get from books is only second-hand 
knowledge , at best y something that the other fellow 
found out for himself ] and y at the worst , something 
which he in his turn accepted at the hands of 
another. 

The tendency for the past several generations has 
unfortunately been in the direction of depending upon 
this sort of second-hand learnings though of late we 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

see increasing signs of a healthy reaction to a more 
independent study of things where this is possible. 

Tet even second-hand knowledge of a subject is 
better than none and we certainly cannot acquire for 
ourselves information on all subjects; and while a few 
things gleaned for ourselves may outvalue, in their 
educational worth, whole volumes of " the written 
word" committed to memory, the written word should 
not be wholly neglected nor despised, but thankfully 
accepted for just what it may be worth. 

So for those who have an interest in Nature, but 
whose lifework affords neither the opportunity nor 
the leisure for the study of such things as I have 
been writing about in these pages ; what I have 
found to tell of my own observation of the ways of 
the woodland folk, may, I trust, offer something both 
of interest and information without at the same time 
spoiling the other fellow' s fun by telling that which he 
might better have found out for himself — a delicate 
problem which must worry the mind of every teacher 
and instructor of those who are eager to learn. 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

Many have expressed surprise that Thoreau 
should have told us so little of the lives of the wild 
creatures of the forest and meadow. The little that 
he has left us shows a keenness of observation and 
insight coupled with a power of putting what he 
saw into words, surpassing that of any other nat- 
uralist. It has frequently been suggested that his 
philosophical trend of thought so often held him in a 
brown study in his walks that he failed to see many 
things directly under his eyes. For my own part, I 
cannot believe this for a moment. He was unquestion- 
ably a born observer of Nature and the gift of ob- 
serving is an instinct that, like instinct of any kind, 
works for itself free and unhampered by the working 
of the mind or the body. It sees and hears and reg- 
isters every track in the clay, every rustle in the 
shadow and the nibbled edge of a grass blade by the 
way, whether its owner be philosophizing or chop- 
ping down a tree for firewood, or both at the same 
time. 

Thoreau was continually regretting (as what trui 
xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

naturalist has not) the days of Audubon and Nut- 
tal and Wilson, when the charm of the unknown and 
the spell of the wilderness still enveloped the lives of 
so many of our common birds and beasts that now 
are catalogued and described in minutest detail. 

Thoreau was a true sportsman, though not given 
to shooting, and apparently preferred to fish for horn- 
pout instead of trout, for your true sportsman is 
ever loath to spoil the sport of those who come after 
him. There is still much to learn of even our com- 
moner wild things, and opportunities of endless de- 
light in the finding it out for ourselves and in finding 
the right words to tell of what we have seen. And 
if ever in a single line we find ourselves consciously 
overstating or misrepresenting the plain truth, take 
that as a sign of utter unworthiness of all the good 
that might otherwise come to us from Nature. And 
may the time be long in coming when Nature shall 
be so thoroughly chronicled here as it is already in 
Europe and Great Britain. I would not under- 
value the great and valuable share which Science 

xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

has taken in the work of Nature-study , while pro- 
testing against the danger of carrying it too far. 

Science s part in this work is one which could be 
achieved in no other way and quite beyond the reach 
of the born observer {if he would continue as such). 
The born observer, by close application to scientific 
methods of study, may, it is true, gather his share of 
such facts for himself, but must pay the necessary 
penalty in the loss of his natural gifts of observation 
and insight, just as present-day methods of educa- 
tion, while bestowing the valuable gifts of concentra- 
tion and scholarly research, which fit one for routine 
and professional work, deaden or even entirely de- 
stroy creative power. My position in this is backed 
up by the personal testimony of Darwin and Edison 
and others. To quote Mrs. John Martin in her 
book, " Is Mankind Advancing!' " / have for 
some years been looking for some recognition on the 
part of scientists of the uselessness of large portions of 
their labors. At last it has come and from the high- 
est authority. Prof. Simon Newcomb, seconded by 

XV 



INTRODUCTION 

Prof. Carl Pearson, Lord Rayleigh, Mr. G. H. 
Darwin, and others, in the Carnegie Institute Re- 
port for 19 14 calls a halt on the frenzied accumula- 
tion of more facts. . " The men of science are as 
fine a body of earnest, untiring, truth-seeking men as 
could well be got together, yet the very intenseness of 
research necessary for the success of their share of 
the work, places the other and {I think it may be 
fairly said) equally valuable side of Nature-study, 
beyond their reach. I have taken long walks with 
men of scientific mind, and they have pointed out to 
me many interesting and beautiful things, which, but 
for them, I should have failed to see, while they in 
turn were equally blind to much that to me appeared 
as obvious as a signboard on the street. 



Contents 



CHAPTER I 



PAGE 



Wild Deer 3 

CHAPTER II 

Wild Cats and Lynxes — Hares and Rabbits 37 

Canada Lynx, Bob Cat 42 

Northern Hare, Gray Rabbit 59 

CHAPTER III 

WOODCHUCKS 85 

CHAPTER IV 

Chipmunk . 107 

xvii 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V 

Brown Rat— House Mouse — Meadow Mouse 
— White-footed Wood Mouse — Jump- 
ing Mouse 132 

CHAPTER VI 
Raccoon — Opossum — Skunk — Porcupine .174 

CHAPTER VII 
Moles, Shrews and Bats 209 

CHAPTER VIII 
Life 245 

CHAPTER IX 
The Home Pasture 274 



XVlll 



List of Illustrations 



Page 
Hares in their Form, or Sleeping Place . . Frontispiece 

Doe and Fawn 7 

Buck Deer 27 

Wildcat, or Bay Lynx 35 

Canada Lynx, or Loup Cervier 43 

Gray Rabbit, or Cottontail, in Summer .... 47 

Gray Rabbit in Winter 55 

Northern Hare in Winter 63 

Northern Hare in Summer 71 

Northern Hare in Late Autumn 77 

Woodchuck 83 

Chipmunk 109 

Chipmunks Harvesting 127 

Brown Rat 133 

House Mice 145 

Meadow Mice 151 

xix 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

White-Footed Mice 159 

Jumping Mouse 169 

Raccoon 177 

Opossum 183 

Skunk 193 

Porcupine 205 

Water Shrew (very rare) 217 

Hairy-Tailed Mole 221 

Star-Nosed Mole 227 

Ground Mole . .231 

Bat 237 

Bats in the Window 241 

Beaver 259 

Snapping Turtle 277 



xx 



More Little Beasts of Field and Wood 



More Little Beasts of 
. Field and Wood 




Chapter I 
Wild Deer 

/ T S HE first settlers of this country found wild 
deer very common everywhere in the pri- 
meval forest. The name " Virginia " deer would 
seem to indicate that in the latitude of the Middle 
States they were most abundant. Venison was the 
staple meat of the families of the pioneers; deer 
were hunted at all seasons with dogs, shot with 
rifles, or smooth bores loaded with slugs or buck- 

3 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

shot, or even snared in their paths like rabbits. 
In the north, where the snow lay deep in the woods 
all winter, the deer were surrounded in their 
yards by parties of hunters on snowshoes, who 
slaughtered bucks, does and fawns without mercy 
or forethought. As early as the middle of the 
eighteenth century deer had become very scarce, 
or even entirely exterminated over a large part of 
the country. Early in the nineteenth century they 
had probably reached their lowest ebb in numbers. 
Even in northern Maine and New Hampshire, in 
the Adirondacks and Alleghanies, and in the Ever- 
glades of Florida they seemed on the verge of 
extinction, though a very few still lingered in the 
pitch-pine barrens of New Jersey and in south- 
eastern Massachusetts. 

Then the game law came to the rescue of the 
few persecuted survivors, though almost every- 
where meeting with the utmost opposition. 

When, as a boy, armed with a single-barreled 
muzzle-loader, I first began hunting the fields 

4 



WILD DEER 

and woods for squirrels, woodchucks, hawks and 
crows, I should as soon have expected to get a 
shot at a bear as a deer. A report then of a deer 
having been seen in one of the neighboring towns 
was greeted by everyone with the greatest incre- 
dulity: " Evidently some stray calf lost in the 
woods." A few years later more circumstantial 
reports by various gunners and berry pickers, of 
a buck with antlers, stirred local hunters to scour 
the woods, as intent upon its destruction as if it 
had been a panther or a wolf. I remember ex- 
postulating with one of these who said in answer: 
"If I don't kill it somebody else will, or, still 
worse, cripple it with a charge of small shot." 
The general explanation then was that it must 
have been a tame deer escaped from captivity. 

At that time deer were increasing in numbers 
throughout northern Maine, New Hampshire 
and Vermont, and gradually working southward. 
As a matter of fact — though most abundant 
there ■ — the climate of northern New England is 

5 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

less favorable to them than is that farther south. 
Where the snow lies deep for months, often 
crusted with an icy surface that prevents them 
from wandering from their yards in search of 
forage, they are at the mercy of the pot hunters 
and lumbermen, who take slight notice of the 
law. In particularly hard winters, it is said that 
large numbers of fawns and even does die from 
starvation. It is to the great stretches of moun- 
tain forest and wild, unsettled country that the 
deer owe their safety. South of the White Moun- 
tains it is only very rarely that deep snow remains 
crusted long enough to put the deer on short 
commons, and just as soon as the law came to 
protect them from the hunters for the greater 
part of the year, the wanderers of the species 
began each season to move farther and farther 
southward. 

Here they found the land less rough and hilly, 
and the forest area more restricted, yet with plenty 
of thick evergreen forest and tangled swamps for 

6 




2 
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WILD DEER 

their concealment. Finally in small numbers they 
reached the salt sea marshes and tide-water river 
meadows, which evidently suited their taste par- 
ticularly well, probably because of the salty taste 
of the wild marsh grass that grows there. 

Here in Rockingham County, in the southern- 
most corner of New Hampshire, after ten years 
of almost complete immunity from being hunted, 
a two-weeks open season was decided upon, be- 
ginning on the first of December of each year. 
It so happened that in 1907, the first year when 
deer shooting was allowed, the first of December 
brought four inches of tracking snow, followed 
by cold weather and more snow, which lasted until 
almost the end of the open season. 

Men and boys turned out and ranged the woods 
in all directions, following the tracks of the 
frightened deer, that, inexperienced in this sort 
of thing, were driven first into range of one gun 
and then another. The slaughter which followed 
was most unsportsmanlike, and at the end of the 

9 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

season only a few deer were left to profit by the 
bitter experience which had taught them wariness. 
In each of the four years since then, the first half 
of December has brought but little snow, and the 
deer having learned caution are well able to 
take care of themselves. Comparatively few have 
been killed, and as a consequence the species has 
increased in this vicinity almost to its former 
abundance. For the first two years the law in- 
sisted upon the use of shotguns with buckshot 
only; many more deer were wounded than were 
killed outright. My own experience during those 
first few seasons of shooting deer with buckshot 
pretty thoroughly disheartened me for that sort 
of thing, and I was very glad when the law was 
changed to permit the use of single ball in 
shotguns. 

On the second day of December, 1907, I found 
the trail of two bucks. After following this 
for an hour or so I became convinced that the 
larger of the two was by no manner of means 

10 



WILD DEER 

unsophisticated. He led the way for the other, 
circling and doubling back on his track, and then 
leaping to one side into the thick undergrowth 
repeatedly threw me off the trail. At last I caught 
the flicker of a white tail as they dashed away, 
and fired, but without effect; then after follow- 
ing them for another half hour, I tried the 
plan of trailing them with the utmost caution, 
until from their footprints in the freezing snow 
I felt certain that I was near my quarry. I 
would then go thirty or forty yards to the lee- 
ward and keep along parallel with their course 
with a sharp lookout into every thicket and clump 
of evergreens where they might be hiding. Grad- 
ually working up to the windward, and finding 
the trail still leading away ahead of me, I would 
make another detour, and at last was rewarded 
by the sight of them standing in a thick birch 
growth not forty yards away. I fired at the big 
buck, aiming at his neck, and he went down into 
the snow, but was instantly on his feet only to fall 

ii 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

again at my second shot, then rise and dash 
away. 

I took up the trail again and followed for a 
mile or more in the failing light of the short 
winter day, with only one glimpse of my game 
running through a swamp out of gunshot; then 
the night shut down and I was unable to follow 
the track any farther. 

The next morning came clear and cold, and 
with an early start I took up the trail where 
I had dropped it the night before; within less 
than half a mile I saw the great buck lying in the 
snow sorely wounded. He was not twenty yards 
away, and as he struggled to his feet I fired at 
his neck, but even at that short range it took three 
charges of buckshot to put an end to his misery. 

He proved to be an old nine-point stag, and his 
wariness was explained by the scars of almost a 
whole charge of No. 2 shot beneath the skin of 
his back, and the long-healed wound of a small 
rifle bullet or slug in his neck. 

12 



WILD DEER 

My next shot, two or three days later, was at a 
spike buck that ran past me across the open pas- 
ture land at a distance of about fifty yards; in 
the brilliant sunlight of a winter noon I could see 
the spot where my buckshot struck him behind the 
shoulder. He winced and went bounding on his 
way up the side of a little knoll, then stumbled 
and fell and was quite dead when I reached him. 

The year following, 1908, the ground was bare 
and hard-frozen, without snow, for the first ten 
days of December, making deer tracking out of 
the question. Then there fell ten inches of dry 
snow, but deer were scarce and had learned to 
keep close and lie low beneath the cover of the 
young evergreens for the first few days after the 
snowfall. On the fourteenth, I had been unsuc- 
cessfully looking for tracks all the morning, when 
most unexpectedly I caught sight of a splendid 
buck standing among the young pines at the foot 
of a low rocky hill. It was a long shot, but I fired 
before I realized the distance, and saw him go 

13 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

bounding away up the stony slope : when I reached 
his track I found the snow spotted here and there 
with drops of blood. 

He led me away over wind-swept ledges and 
down long gullies and frozen water-courses, 
through thick tangled underbrush and dark hem- 
lock woods, until at last, looking ahead, I saw 
three tracks in the snow instead of one and knew 
that, as is the habit of deer before lying down, 
he had gone back, retracing his footsteps for a 
little distance, in order to see if an enemy were 
following. Then I moved along parallel with 
his course and half a gunshot to the leeward of 
it, and saw among other half snow-buried boul- 
ders in the shadow of the pines, one which held 
my attention. I raised my gun, but before I had 
sighted he leaped into the air and away as I fired 
both barrels in quick succession. Half a mile 
farther on, in making the circuit of a clump of 
young pines at the edge of a stump-dotted clearing, 
I saw no sign of his hoofprints and knew that, 

H 



WILD DEER 

either he was in hiding there, or else had doubled 
back on his tracks and outwitted me. Retreating 
in my own footsteps until I had the northwest 
wind in my face, I pushed my way cautiously in 
among the little pines, which covered perhaps 
half an acre, and though hardly higher than my 
head were so dense and thickly crowded together 
as to be almost impenetrable. 

Suddenly I saw the deer dash across a little 
opening; I fired both barrels, saw him stumble, but 
regain his feet and vanish among the trees. Fol- 
lowing his hoofprints, which now showed him to 
be traveling with enormous bounds, down into a 
hollow and up the slope beyond, I came face to 
face with a startled woodchopper standing open- 
mouthed and astounded. He declared that the 
biggest buck he had ever seen had almost run him 
down, had turned its course when almost upon 
him, and gone from sight as quickly as it had come. 

After that I followed the wounded deer for 
miles, but he was traveling down the wind, having 

15 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

succeeded in getting to the leeward of me, and I 
saw him no more. Darkness came down over the 
forest and I made my way home disheartened with 
my day's work, the last of the hunting season for 
that year. 

In 1909 conditions for deer shooting were very 
similar to those of the previous year, though with 
one or two light snowfalls and warm, thawy days 
for tracking. On one of these I followed a 
trail through low, wet woodland, picking my way 
with caution between fallen twigs, any one of 
which if trod upon might have startled my quarry. 
Peering through wet blueberry bushes and maple 
saplings I saw the merest flicker of a white tail 
not thirty yards away. I felt certain that a deer 
was there, but could not be sure that it was not a 
fawn. After waiting motionless for what seemed 
a long time, I took a few cautious steps, still keep- 
ing my eye on that point among the bushes where 
I felt certain that a deer was hiding; a twig 
snapped beneath my moccasin and the deer sprung 

16 



WILD DEER 

into sight, clearing bushes higher than a man's 
head at a bound. I fired while he was in the air 
and he stumbled and fell as he came down, but 
gathered himself and was away out of gunshot 
before I could reload. In the soft earth of the 
swampland I followed him without much diffi- 
culty, till coming to the ledgy slope of a hill over- 
grown with ground junipers and dense young pines, 
I lost the trail, and though I circled the place in 
ever-widening rings for an hour or more, I failed 
to pick it up again and was forced to the conclu- 
sion that the unfortunate deer must be lying in 
hiding or dead somewhere beneath that thick, 
matted growth of junipers. I then and there fore- 
swore the use of buckshot in deer hunting. 

Last year, 1910, on the afternoon of the first 
day of the open season, I trailed a deer over soft 
pine needles and wet leaves through an alder 
swamp until I heard the faint rustle of his feet 
beneath the pines, and then crouched motionless, 
watching for a sight. For some time I heard him 

17 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

moving about, evidently feeding. The light was 
failing fast, and when finally I caught sight of my 
quarry it was just the merest glimpse as he crossed 
a little vista between the tree trunks. A little 
later I saw him again, but not clearly enough for 
a safe shot, and I was determined, if possible, not 
to have another wounded deer escape me as the 
last two had done. 

I crouched, listening to faint sounds of little 
hoofs moving about here and there, until the soft 
night wind springing up, sighed among the pine 
boughs overhead and carried my scent in his 
direction. With a whistle of alarm he dashed 
away, stopping at a safe distance among the dark 
forest shadows to stamp defiance, or a warning 
to his fellows that danger lurked near. It was 
then too dark to follow him farther and I gave 
up the chase. 

A few days after that I woke in the morning to 
find the ground sprinkled with snow and a cold 
north wind clearing the sky of clouds. 

18 



WILD DEER 

About midforenoon I found the tracks of three 
buck deer in a hardwood upland growth. They 
led down the wind and had evidently been made 
several hours, but I followed until they showed 
more freshly made and led away along a rocky 
ridge toward a thick pine growth on a southern 
hillside. Believing the deer to be in hiding there, 
I bore away to the eastward, following down the 
course of a narrow rock-strewn gully through 
which a little spring brook flowed. 

Just before I reached the mouth of the gully, 
where it opened out to form a little tussocky 
meadow shut in by the pine woods, I noticed 
an old, weatherbeaten, grayish-tawny pine stub 
among the green foliage of the pines on the oppo- 
site hillside. As I gazed at it intently it gradually 
took on the outline of the head and shoulders of 
a stag with antlers mimicking wind-bleached knots 
and broken branches. I raised my gun and fired, 
aiming at the shoulder, and a splendid three-point 
buck dropped in his tracks never to rise again. 

19 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

My ounce ball had gone clear through shoulder 
and shoulder-blade and the bones of the neck and 
out the other side. 

At the sound of my shot another deer sprung 
up and dashed away among the trees. The law 
last season allowed one to kill two deer, yet though 
my other barrel was still loaded, I am glad to be 
able to say that I felt no temptation to fire at 
him then or to follow his tracks, which led up 
wind and might have given me another shot. 

This year, 191 1, conditions have all been in 
favor of the deer, even more so than during the 
three previous seasons; two weeks of beauti- 
fully mild weather without rain or snow, and so 
nearly windless as to render noiseless walking 
over the dry floor of the woodlands out of the 
question for anyone not born an Indian. 

On two days only has the earth been sufficiently 
thawed to make deer tracking possible. About 
the only chance for a shot has been to lie in wait, 
hoping that the deer might come within gunshot 

20 



WILD DEER 

of their own accord, and this has not happened to 
be my luck this season. 

Yet, though I have not so much as fired at a 
deer, I feel that these two weeks have been well 
spent; days of quiet enjoyment in the w T ild lands, 
seeing the little woodland folk busy about their 
own affairs. Day after day I have risen early, 
seen to the furnace, started the kitchen fires, done 
my work at the barn and got my own breakfast 
in time to be in the woods before daylight. 

I have watched the stars grow dim and the 
light come in the east, while I listened to and en- 
deavored to identify the various footfalls and 
distant faint sounds of the forest, hoping that each 
might prove to be a deer approaching. 

Morning and evening I have heard the owls 
hooting and the foxes barking on the hillside. 
I have found deer tracks and well-trodden paths, 
but somehow, now that the season has opened, the 
deer themselves are very hard to find. Late in 
the afternoon of one of the first days of the sea- 

21 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

son, with the earth still frozen too hard for track- 
ing and the outlook for getting a shot at a deer 
about as unpromising as it possibly could be, I 
bethought myself that there was no meat in the 
house, with the market four miles away and the 
butcher not coming until the day after the morrow. 
It was still early in the season, and, the law 
allowing only one deer for each hunter this year, 
I felt quite certain of getting mine before the 
season was past, for they have been increasing 
pretty steadily in numbers for the last three years. 
Last summer on more than one occasion I had 
seen them in parties of three or four together in 
the open field near my house. I determined 
therefore to take home a pair of rabbits for to- 
morrow's dinner, and removing the ball cartridges 
and replacing them with No. 6 shot, I went hunt- 
ing for rabbit instead of deer. In half an hour 
I had my first one safely tucked away in the pocket 
of my shooting coat, and paused for a moment to 
consider whether it would not be wiser to reload 

22 



WILD DEER 

with ball, at least in my left barrel, on the chance 
of getting a shot at a deer in the low woodland on 
my way home. As luck would have it I decided 
on rabbit shot instead of ball, and also as luck 
would have it, in crossing a little intervale of birch 
and maple sprout-land between dark hemlock 
woods, I started a fine buck that ran for a few 
rods in plain sight, leaped a combination brush 
and barbed-wire fence, stood motionless for al- 
most a second at the edge of the hemlocks, and 
then noiselessly vanished among the black shadows 
before I could change my shot cartridges for 
ball. 

I followed for a little distance, but soon lost 
the trail, and leaving the woodland shadows for 
the open, went home across the flat meadow-land 
in the gathering dusk, hardly feeling a regret, at 
the time, that I had thrown away my first chance 
of the season for a shot. 

For had I succeeded in killing my deer then, 
what excuse should I have left for more days of 

23 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

leisurely still-hunting in the late autumn woods? 
however, I must admit that as successive days went 
by without offering me another chance, I came to 
regret more and more that I had chosen the prob- 
ability of rabbit meat for the possibility of veni- 
son, on that particular occasion. 

Our common wild deer, the white-tailed deer 
as it is now generally called, is possessed of won- 
derful powers of adapting itself to circumstances 
and changing conditions wherever it is given the 
slightest chance. In the White Mountains you 
will find its trodden paths winding upward among 
the rocky ledges and precipices, as high as the 
woods ascend. In many places where deer tracks 
show them to be as abundant as rabbits, you may 
lie in wait, day after day, or range the woods with 
noiseless footfall, without getting so much as a 
glimpse of one. After a very few seasons, how- 
ever, of immunity from being hunted, particu- 
larly where there is much cultivated land with 
wide-stretching pastures and meadows, they lose 

24 ' 



WILD DEER 

much of their native wildness. This is not to be 
wondered at, but it is somewhat more astonishing 
that, where a short open season is allowed each 
fall, the deer, though as wild and difficult to find 
— in spite of the narrow limits of their wood- 
land hiding places — as are those who inhabit the 
limitless mountain fastnesses, should, during the 
rest of the year, regain not a little of their fear- 
lessness and freedom of movement, and not in- 
frequently be seen, even on bright days, in the 
cultivated open land and orchards. 

This leads one to the belief that, wherever deer 
retain all their wildness and secretive ways 
throughout the year, the law is but lightly held. 
In farming regions there is always more or less 
complaint of the damage done by them to grow- 
ing crops and young orchards. For my own part, 
while I not infrequently see them in my field dur- 
ing the warm months, and find their telltale hoof- 
prints with much greater frequency, I cannot say 
that I have ever suffered one dollar's loss from 

25 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

these visits. I have seen them, by twos and threes, 
enter a field of tasseling corn, and a little later 
emerge from the other side, yet, following in their 
footsteps, could see no sign of even a leaf nipped 
off. Undoubtedly, on occasion, new crops just 
springing from the soil, in particular the tender 
low-growing kinds, may be seriously damaged, or 
even ruined, by repeated visits. Young orchard 
trees also are often too severely pruned by deer 
who in the late winter and early spring nibble 
the tender bark and twigs. 

My cousin, whose farm lies next to mine, had a 
number of most promising young apple trees 
ruined in August by an old buck, who perversely 
chose these particular trees on which to rub off 
the loosening velvet from his antlers, and at the 
same time rubbed off most of the bark from the 
stems and lower branches. Throughout the woods 
where deer are common you will find young 
straight-stemmed trees a few inches in diameter, 
— ash or maple or chestnut, — with their smooth 

26 




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WILD DEER 

bark hanging in shreds and tatters, where a buck 
has polished his new-grown antlers. At times, 
even quite late in the fall, I have heard the rat- 
tling of antlers on wood, deep in some hidden 
thicket or swamp, but have never yet succeeded in 
catching a buck in the act. 

They are said to be possessed of a belligerent 
and war-like spirit at such times, ready to charge 
and fight any other male of their species that may 
approach. On more than one occasion men have 
been attacked and seriously injured, or even killed 
by them in parks and regions where deer have 
been overprotected for a number of years. For 
their first year the young bucks are without antlers, 
but in their second summer, slender, straight horns 
arise from their foreheads, and they are then 
known as " spike bucks," by the hunters. All 
buck deer, both young and old, shed their antlers 
late in the winter. These become loosened where 
they join^the skull and are dropped off, or rubbed 
off against a tree. The following summer a new 

29 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

pair spring out, completing their growth in the 
short space of a few weeks, each year showing 
a new prong, until the full set of nine prongs 
makes him a " nine-point buck." 

At first the antlers are soft and tender, full 
of little blood vessels, covered with a shaggy 
growth of velvet, and so sensitive that their owner 
is continually pestered and annoyed by the biting 
flies and mosquitoes of the swamps, for the first 
few weeks before they have had time to harden. 
Thus, that which is to be his weapon of defense 
is now his most vulnerable point. 

The shed antlers, softened by melting snow and 
spring rains, are nibbled at and often entirely 
devoured by woodmice, squirrels and hedgehogs, 
perhaps for the lime that they contain, for of 
actual nourishment they can have but very little; 
still, at that season of the year, all the wildwood 
folk are on short commons, and undoubtedly are 
often glad to get even so unpalatable a morsel as 
a deer's horns. I have an antler showing dis- 

30 



WILD DEER 

tinctly the marks of little teeth, which had de- 
voured a considerable portion of it when it was 
found. In spite of the number of antlers that are 
dropped in the woods each winter, it is only very 
rarely that one is found. 

The little fawns are born in May, either as lone 
babies or as twins. They are beautifully spotted 
with white on a buff ground. 

I have watched a little one only a day or two 
old, following its mother as she nibbled and 
browsed here and there in a little, sunlit opening 
among the maples. At first they are very secre- 
tive in their ways and rarely seen. When their 
mother is away they lie close hidden in the grass 
or bushes, and will allow themselves to be all but 
trodden upon before they will stir or make the 
slightest sound. Although the mother may have 
wandered away a quarter of a mile or more while 
feeding, her sensitive ears warn her at once of 
your distant approach, no matter how carefully 
you may tread. She follows you, lurking anx- 

3i 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

iously near, without showing herself, however, 
unless you actually succeed in discovering her 
treasure. When her alarm for its safety over- 
comes her timidity, she will run circling around 
you, bleating and stamping in her terror and ap- 
prehension. After mid-summer, the fawns, now 
nearly half grown, are frequently to be seen feed- 
ing, either by themselves, or in company with 
their mother, at the edge of grass fields and 
meadows. 

One rainy morning last spring, while trout fish- 
ing, I witnessed a very pretty little woodland 
comedy. First I heard an angry stamping, and 
saw an old buck deer standing among the birches, 
his head held high, eyeing me. He was hardly 
half a dozen rods away, but the falling rain pre- 
vented him from getting my scent, and my wet 
khaki clothes so matched the color of a deer at 
that season, he evidently was doubtful of my 
identity. Presently a doe and a yearling fawn 
showed themselves. The fawn must have been 

32 



WILD DEER 

long weaned, but now the sight of a little new 
brother or sister taking its nourishment had evi- 
dently awakened his early appetite for milk, for 
he followed his mother, hardly bigger than him- 
self, teasing to be allowed a share. 




33 




25^ 



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Chapter II 

Wild Cats and Lynxes — Hares and 
Rabbits 

CCIENTIFICALLY speaking, we have no true 
wildcats in this country. We have, however, 
beside the common wildcat, or bob cat, or bay 
lynx, numerous members of the race of domestic 
cat run wild, in varying stages of savagery, from 
those which, obeying the call of the wild, leave 
their homes on long, lonely hunts of weeks' or 
months' duration, to the more nearly wild sort, 
born in the woods of parents who themselves 
were born, and have always lived, a wild life. 

37 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

Some of these approach very nearly to the type 
of true wildcat, found in the Old World, that 
many of the earlier naturalists believed to have 
sprung from the domestic cat in precisely this 
way. 

Very few house cats are entirely domestic, fond 
as they may be of a warm fireside and cooked 
food and petting, the step back to a more or less 
wild state is with them very easily taken. 

The wildcat of Europe is like a heavily built, 
thick furred, bushy tailed tabby, and many a fam- 
ily of our own tabbies, after a generation or two 
of life in the wildwood, gives evidence of revert- 
ing to that type, particularly if there should chance 
to be a trace of " down east " coon-cat blood in 
their veins; but there is this marked difference, 
that with very little encouragement most of them 
are ready to return to civilization, at least tem- 
porarily, while the true wildcat appears to be 
impossible of domestication, even when taken in 
the kitten stage. 

38 



WILDCATS AND LYNXES 

The American wildcat or bob cat is of an en- 
tirely different species. It is a genuine lynx, long 
bodied, heavy limbed, short tailed and flat faced. 
Its fur is reddish-tawny, spotted with black, or 
dusky. Now while it is true that the bob cat 
when cornered is about as savage and ugly a beast 
as any that roams the woods, it is ridiculous to 
think of the dwellers in country places being often 
thrown into a condition of nervous terror at the 
report of a wildcat seen in the region; and 
just as ridiculous is it that, when such a rumor is 
once started, there will be dozens of repetitions 
by one and another who believe that they have 
seen the creature prowling about in search of 
victims. 

As far as I can discover, wildcats are not com- 
mon in any part of New England, and in most 
places are exceedingly rare. I have never yet seen 
one in the wild state to be certain of its identity, 
nor even succeeded in trapping one, though I have 
followed tracks in the snow which I felt certain 

39 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

were made by them. They seem to be about the 
most wild and retiring of all the wood dwellers. 
I am inclined to think that a family of them 
might inhabit a berry pasture near a country vil- 
lage for years and none of the inhabitants of that 
village be any the wiser concerning them. Their 
russet and buff spotted fur blends so beautifully 
with the elusive light and shade of the woodland 
ferns and undergrowth, and their furred feet 
carry them so noiselessly, the chance of one of 
their number being seen and identified is very 
small indeed. 

Very possibly one or another of the fleeting 
glimpses I have had of disappearing furry backs 
which I have failed to identify might on closer 
approach have revealed themselves as wildcats. 

Wildcats and lynxes seem to prefer thick 
swamps and bushy hillsides and old forest clear- 
ings where the tree tops and branches left by the 
lumbermen, and the new growth and brambles, 
make just such tangles as rabbits love to dwell in, 

40 



WILDCATS AND LYNXES 

for rabbits are the bob cats' favorite game. In 
such places they can lurk in hiding, or sun them- 
selves stretched at length along crumbling logs at 
noon day, and at twilight start out to hunt rab- 
bits along their trodden paths. 

In many parts of New England they are said 
to be increasing with the increase of wild deer. 
It is not improbable that they may kill fawns from 
time to time in spite of the vigilance of the old 
doe; they may also get an occasional stray lamb 
in distant hillside pastures. They seem to have 
no regular homes, but lead a rather vagabond 
sort of life, a cave among the ledges, a hollow 
tree, or prostrate log being their nearest approach 
to a dwelling place. At other times they sleep 
in sun or shade, either curled up in some sheltered 
nook among the brambles or else stretched along 
the branch of a tree, and ever with keen eyes, and 
ears alert for every faintest rustle that may tell 
them of approaching game, that may appease their 
own hunger, or else be taken to the secret hiding 

4i 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

place where the fierce-eyed little bob kittens 
wait. 

The Canada lynx, called by the French Cana- 
dians Loup Cervier, is larger and more heavily 
built than the bob cat, with shorter tail and long 
black ear tufts and longer, thicker fur of soft 
blended gray. It is occasionally found in the 
Northern States. 

Its habits do not appear to be very different 
from those of the bob cat. It is a northern spe- 
cies, found in most abundance along the southern 
boundary of the barren grounds. 

Lynxes, like one or the other of these species, 
are found all round the world along the northern 
forest line. Branches of the family have spread 
southward, wherever conditions are most favor- 
able, as far as the tropics, although the northern 
forests seem to be the natural home of the race. 
Wherever found, certain characteristics would 
seem to mark them off from the other cats, though 
cats they certainly are beyond a doubt, the short 

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HARES AND RABBITS 

tail and long-tufted ears and their peculiar man- 
ner of traveling with leaps and bounds being most 
characteristic. Their flesh is said to be light col- 
ored and well flavored, and is not infrequently 
eaten by white and half-breed hunters as well as 
Indians. 

Hares and rabbits as a family have been the 
source of much speculation and argument among 
naturalists of all ages. The present tendency 
would appear to be towards the opinion that 
differences between them are less fixed than 
was once held to be the case. Each of us has 
the privilege of holding his own view in the 
matter, and for my own part I am inclined to 
believe that the differences which distinguish the 
rabbits are all modifications brought about by 
domestication : First that all the originally wild 
species were hares, which are merely a sort of 
degenerate offshoot of the lynxes adapted to a 
vegetable diet; that domestication and confine- 

45 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

ment developed the weaker, short-legged type 
known as rabbits, and that all wild rabbits are 
descended from tame ancestors that at one time 
or another have escaped and run wild. Our com- 
mon gray rabbit or cottontail possesses many 
characteristics both of the rabbit and hare family. 
The fact that there is no record of its having 
been found in any part of this country in the 
days of the pioneers would seem to indicate that 
its ancestors were brought here as tame English 
or Dutch rabbits, and that life in the forest has 
brought about a partial reversion to the original 
hare type. I believe that the modification of any 
species is much more quickly brought about than 
is commonly supposed, particularly in a species 
that breeds and matures as rapidly as the 
hares and rabbits. Four or five hundred gen- 
erations have had time to live their lives and 
die since the time at which we may suppose 
the first tame rabbits escaped and ran wild in 
this country. 

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HARES AND RABBITS 

In making a distinction between hares and rab- 
bits, naturalists in Europe have as a rule placed 
particular stress on the fact that rabbits at birth 
are " blind, naked and helpless/' while young 
hares are born with open eyes, a coat of short 
fur, and more or less ability to take care of them- 
selves. Another distinction considered perhaps 
of even greater importance is that while rabbits 
live in holes in the earth which they dig for 
themselves, hares never do, but make their nests 
in forms, as they are called, in the grass or 
bushes. Now, though our common cottontails 
are classed as hares, we find them quite as fre- 
quently dwelling in underground burrows as in 
forms, and as a rule bringing forth their young 
under ground. Only last May I saw a family of 
them turned out by the plough, in an old pasture, 
and they most certainly corresponded to the gen- 
erally accepted classification of young rabbits, 
being blind, naked and helpless beyond dispute. 
Winter or summer you will find the feet of any 

49 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

cottontail that you may have the chance to ex- 
amine, stained and discolored by the subsoil from 
the depths of its burrow. I have never known a 
cottontail to dig its own burrow, its habit being 
instead to appropriate the disused burrow of a 
woodchuck, of which there are enough and to 
spare. Cottontails feed principally in the morn- 
ing and evening twilight. On first leaving their 
holes they stop, with just enough of their heads 
above ground to enable them to see and hear 
without themselves being seen. A half hour may 
elapse before they venture to come out into sight, 
and in the meantime the big ears are taking in 
every faintest rustle within the radius of half a 
mile, when the winds are still. The wrinkled nose 
is continually in motion, sniffing the air for the 
scent of fox, dog, man or weasel to the wind- 
ward. " Brer Rabbit, " sitting motionless as a 
statue, in his doorway, exhibits no outward mani- 
festation of interest in his surroundings, yet his 
keen senses are forever conveying to his little 

SO 



HARES AND RABBITS 

brain news of all that is going on in the sur- 
rounding woods. Whatever his grade of intel- 
ligence — and I am inclined to think it rather 
belo*w that of the majority of the wood dwellers 
— it is evidently high enough to keep him from 
carelessly running into danger; undoubtedly he 
owes his safety to instinct oftener than to reason, 
as is true of all of us who lead active, out-of- 
door lives. I have passed no small part of my 
life in the woods, and as a matter of course have 
seen thousands of wild rabbits at one time and 
another, and it is astonishing, when I come to 
think of it, how very few of them I have caught 
unawares, — a thing that has almost always hap- 
pened in stormy weather when scent and hearing 
are not to be relied upon. Brer Rabbit knows 
if you or any other enemy is in the vicinity, and 
knowing this holds himself motionless wherever 
he may happen to be, whether in his doorway 
or crouching in his form on the sunny side of a 
stump, or squatting midway in his path or beneath 

5* 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

the bush he was browsing upon. And just there 
he remains. Time is of no value to him, no 
amount of patient waiting on your part is likely 
to be rewarded by the satisfaction of seeing him 
resume the interrupted course of his affairs. Of 
all the woodland dwellers I have had the 
chance of observing, deer, foxes, mink, otter, 
woodchucks or mice, a pretty large proportion 
was actively engaged at one thing or another, 
— hunting, fishing or feeding, playing or work- 
ing; but, as I have said before, not one Brer Rabbit 
in hundreds have I thus caught unawares. Often 
— - though not invariably — I hear him give warn- 
ing to his fellows of my approach by thumping 
the ground with a furred hind foot. It fre- 
quently happens that in a morning's walk I see 
three or four rabbits crouching half hidden in the 
undergrowth and evidently believing themselves 
unseen. In the matter of avoiding their enemies 
in the open they certainly exhibit considerable 
slyness, but in no other way, so far as my obser- 

52 



HARES AND RABBITS 

vation goes, do they give evidence of the least 
ingenuity either as individuals or as a species. 
All the other rodents are possessed of construc- 
tive ability, either as builders, or diggers in the 
earth. While the wild rabbits of the Old World 
have learned the art of making underground 
homes of their own, in this country they live 
after the manner of the wildcats, lynxes and deer, 
taking things as they find them. The woodchuck 
holes which they appropriate are never remodeled 
in any way, not even to the extent of carrying 
in grass or dry leaves for the nest, which is com- 
monly lined with their own fur, either shed in 
the natural season or plucked out intentionally. 

Though they go day after day in the fall to 
certain old apple trees at the edge of the woods, 
to nibble at the fruit half buried among the 
fallen leaves beneath, it never seems to occur to 
them that by simply carrying home an apple in 
their teeth, after each visit, they could have un- 
frozen apples to eat in the bitter weather that 

S3 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

is sure to follow. When such weather does come 
they are forced to subsist upon a diet of maple 
twigs and blackberry stalks, though under the 
snow is still half the old trees' crop of fruit, 
unfrozen in those winters when the snow comes 
before the extreme cold. The form where Brer 
Rabbit loves to sun himself on winter afternoons 
shows no arrangement of twigs and weed stalks, 
such as we see in the stools and resting places 
of beaver and muskrat, but is simply a chosen 
spot trodden flat by use. Mr. Rabbit dislikes 
rainy weather and objects to wetting his feet 
quite as much as cats do, yet like the cats he 
can swim well enough when necessity puts him 
to the test. In the seaboard marshes of the 
Southern States and in the swamps of the lower 
Mississippi are found the marsh hare and the 
water hare, evidently members of the northern 
hare, or Jack rabbit, tribe, that have taken to 
dwelling in wet lands and adapted themselves 
to the situation. The marsh hare in particular, 

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HARES AND RABBITS 

with its short legs, short, rounded ears, dull, 
mud-colored fur, and feet almost destitute of hair 
beneath, has become nearly as aquatic as a 
muskrat. The water hare, like the Jack rabbit, 
northern hare and polar hare, was undoubtedly 
native to this country ages before the white men 
came. The northern hare — commonly known 
as white rabbit or snowshoe rabbit — is now only 
found in northern New England and New York, 
ranging south a little way down the Alleghanies. 
North of the Canadian boundary line it is com- 
mon as far as the woods extend, beyond which 
its place is taken by the polar hare of the arctic 
region. In earlier days the northern hare was 
abundant in all the Eastern States as far south as 
Virginia ; the gray rabbit or cottontail was then 
unheard of. My father has told me that he re- 
membered the first gray rabbits reported by the 
local gunners here in southern New Hampshire. 
They were naturally assumed to be tame rabbits 
run wild, and were known as " conies M to dis- 

57 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

tinguish them from the northern hare, which was 
always called rabbit. At the time that I first 
began to roam the woods this division of titles 
still held; a rabbit was a rabbit and a cony was 
a cony, though at that time rabbits were already 
becoming scarce and conies the predominant spe- 
cies. Then the white rabbit practically vanished, 
only to reappear again in ever diminishing num- 
bers at recurring intervals of seven or eight years. 
I can count three of these returns of the white 
rabbit to these woods within my own memory, 
the last in 1894. On the heavily timbered slopes 
of Pine Hill in North Hampton, N. H., a little 
colony of them lingered on until within compara- 
tively few years, but the last time that I hunted 
those woods, in the fall of 1909, I found no sign 
of them, nor can I learn of any spot where they 
are to be found in any abundance south of Lake 
Winnipiseogee. On the mountains to the north 
of the Lake they appear to be the predominant 
species. I found them even abundant on the 

58 



HARES AND RABBITS 

rocky, treeless summit of Mt. Keasarge, where 
were only wind-stunted whortleberry bushes and 
such low growths for them to hide in. 

It is to be regretted that the fascinating title 
of cony as locally applied to the gray rabbit is 
fast falling into disuse ; now that the white rabbit 
has practically disappeared, rabbit is becoming 
the common name for its successor the gray 
rabbit, cottontail — the almost universal cogno- 
men south and west — is seldom heard in this 
part of the country. 

The northern hare, from what I have seen of 
it in a state of nature, appears to be even less 
intelligent than the gray rabbit; depending for 
safety upon its tremendous powers of running 
and leaping, and a coat of fur that matches its 
surroundings season for season. During the late 
spring, summer and early autumn it is cinnamon 
or russet brown, to match the ferns and fallen 
leaves and pine needles beneath the shadow of 
the evergreens. In winter it is white like the 

59 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

snow, and in the late spring and early fall shows 
a curious blending of colors, white and russet 
and gray fur in varying proportions, as the sea- 
sons come and go. The northern hare is an in- 
habitant of deep swamps and heavily wooded hill- 
sides; where a colony is established you will find 
the well-trodden paths and roadways leading 
from place to place. Although they have no 
holes or regular dwelling places of any sort they 
are wonderfully clever at keeping out of sight. 

The game of hide-and-seek is a matter of life 
and death with them, and through generation 
after generation of playing it with one opponent 
after another their race has succeeded in bring- 
ing it pretty nearly to a state of perfection. Its 
food is much the same as that of the gray rab- 
bit, browsing and nibbling here and there about 
the forests and swamps with never a thought of 
the morrow, but at all times instantly alert for 
any distant sound or scent of a possible enemy. 

In midnight storms of wind and rain they do not 

60 



HARES AND RABBITS 

retire to the protection of underground homes or 
the cavities of dying trees or even a cave among 
the rocks; instead they simply .crouch with 
humped backs under the dripping boughs while 
the storm howls through the forest; their near- 
est approach to domiciles of their own is in the 
winter when heavy snows burden the sighing 
evergreens. As the storm comes on, these white 
rabbits, having satisfied their hunger with nib- 
bling of twigs and tender bark, hop away to the 
shelter of the young spruces, to crouch there 
under the low thick branches while the burden 
of falling snow increases and the over-weighted 
boughs droop under the gathering load until 
trees of a few summers' growth show only as 
white mounds on the white floor of the forest. 
But beneath each of these white mounds is a 
snug little room surrounding the trunk of the 
tree, with a carpet of dry needles under foot and 
a roof of low, snow-buried branches overhead; 

in this hidden nook the hare cowers half asleep, 

61 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

protected from wind and weather and in com- 
parative safety from the attacks of the hungry 
prowlers without. He may pass several days in 
these cramped quarters, nibbling at such herbage 
as he is able to uncover by nosing into the sur- 
rounding snow, until at last his increasing hunger 
urges him to push his way up through the drifts 
out into the open air. His broad hind feet — 
which have earned him the title of snowshoe 
rabbit — carry him easily over the new fallen 
snow as he hops away, following the course of 
his buried path until joining the tracks of others 
of his kind, a new path is tracked out and in a 
short time becomes a well-beaten roadway. In 
the open timber these rabbit roads are clearly 
visible at a distance; then for long reaches are 
hidden from sight under the snow-laden boughs 
of the undergrowth, in places being veritable 
snow tunnels or subways roofed with snow. 

Are hares and rabbits rodents or are they 
merely a degenerate branch of the carnivora 

62 




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HARES AND RABBITS 

forced by circumstances during some long for- 
gotten period of hardship and poor hunting to 
adapt themselves to a vegetable diet? I have 
studied the question from one point of view and 
another until fully convinced that this is the true 
solution of many a vexed point concerning them. 
On more than one occasion I had been asked 
by people of more than common intelligence if 
I believed it possible for cats and rabbits to in- 
terbreed. My questioner in each instance felt 
perfectly certain that cases under observation 
bore sufficient proof to settle the matter beyond 
all ordinary doubt. Now while classed among 
the rodents, hares and rabbits have always been 
in a group by themselves. All other rodents are 
characterized by their incisors; two pairs of 
strong, chisel-like teeth for gnawing. In the 
hares and rabbits the under jaw is furnished in 
this manner, but in the upper jaw these are re- 
placed by four small and comparatively weak 
teeth that resemble the front teeth of a flesh eater 

65 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

quite as much as they do the typical incisors of 
a rodent. In very young specimens there is yet 
another pair of even smaller teeth both in the 
upper and lower jaw beside the permanent ones, 
and it is a fact worth noting that in kittens and 
very young rabbits the dentition is more nearly 
alike than in adults. Now in pointing out the 
most insurmountable barrier to any possible re- 
lationship between cats and rabbits one would 
naturally indicate the distinguishing character of 
their teeth; yet while classifying animals by den- 
tition we must not lose sight of the fact that the 
variation of the teeth was undoubtedly caused 
by the use and disuse of different teeth incident 
to the nature of the food the animal lived upon, 
and that we have no way of knowing just how 
long a period is required to bring about this 
modification. That the rodents became separated 
very far back in the history of animal life is a 
self-evident fact well borne out by sufficient tes- 
timony of fossil remains of the different ages, 

66 



HARES AND RABBITS 

but let us suppose that the ancestors of our hares 
and rabbits were not included among the earlier 
rodents. Consider the possibility that at some 
much later period when the cat family had at- 
tained to something like its present stage of de- 
velopment, an island cut off from the mainland, 
should in the absence of native carnivora be- 
come overrun with mice, lemmings, and other 
small and defenceless animals; then that during 
a period of excessively cold winters a number 
of the smaller varieties of wildcats or lynxes 
driven southward by the cold or scarcity of food 
should find a way across the ice to this island, 
where, finding the hunting so good, they would 
remain until cut off from the mainland by the 
melting of the ice. Here they would breed and 
multiply until their numbers were increased to 
such an extent that at last the small animals that 
they had been living upon would be completely 
exterminated. Now in cases of this kind there 
are two courses which animals may follow ac- 

6 7 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

cording to the laws of Nature, for when the 
supply of food is cut off no animal will give up 
its hold on life without a tremendous struggle. 
The larger and stronger of these cats would 
begin to prey upon the smaller and weaker ones, 
while these in their turn would be under the 
necessity of feeding upon whatever they could 
get, and long before the last of the mice and in- 
sects had vanished would be tasting and nibbling 
at grass and berries and mushrooms, as cats, 
weasels and foxes will ever do in times of famine. 
Now the law of the survival of the fittest works 
unceasingly and is ever ready at just such an 
opening to step in and work surprising changes; 
use and disuse are its most potent factors; only 
a very small proportion of the cats on the island 
could possibly survive through many seasons of 
such privations, and these few would be the ones 
best able to adapt themselves to the changed 
conditions, viz. certain of the larger ones that 
proved strong and active enough to succeed in 

68 



HARES AND RABBITS 

killing a sufficient number of their weaker 
brethren, and those among the smaller ones that 
managed to survive on a vegetable diet and at 
the same time maintain that swiftness and agility 
which formerly had enabled them to catch more 
than their share of the rapidly diminishing supply 
of mice and insects and " other small deer," and 
must now insure their safety from being caught 
and eaten in their turn. The kittens of these few 
survivors would unquestionably have a somewhat 
better chance than their parents, one of Nature's 
foremost laws being that the coming generation 
must be cherished, even at the expense of the 
one that went before; nourished for a time on 
milk (though the supply must necessarily be con- 
siderably shortened on account of the meager 
diet of their mothers), they would at a very 
early age learn to follow the example of the 
older ones and take to nibbling at such plants as 
had proved to be most nourishing to their race, 
in most cases quickly adapting themselves to 

69 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

a wholly vegetable diet. Then the law of use 
and disuse would step in. As generation suc- 
ceeded generation of these small, grass-eating 
cats, the sharp two-edged canine teeth of their 
race (always inconspicuous in kittens) would grad- 
ually cease to be developed, while the incisors, 
which in a full-grown cat you may see as six 
small teeth set in a row between the projecting 
canines, would prove the more useful and in time 
would become the principal cutting or gnawing 
teeth, following the same law of development 
through need which ages before, we may sup- 
pose, built up the characteristic gnawing teeth 
of the true rodents. Other changes would of 
course be going on all the time. From con- 
stantly pushing through between the stems of 
bushes and thick grass (among which they would 
naturally find their safest hiding places) the 
round flat head of the cat tribe would give place 
to a narrow shape, which would have the added 
advantage of placing the eyes where they could 

70 




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HARES AND RABBITS 

see above and behind and on all sides at any 
time to forestall the possible approach of an 
enemy, whereas the eyes of a cat are set to focus 
directly in front in order better to see the quarry 
ahead, like those of a bird of prey. Following 
out along the same line we can see how the ears 
would grow longer to catch every faintest sound 
that might come down the wind, the hind legs 
longer for speed in running away, while the claws 
would lose their sharp tearing hooks through 
disuse; for the economy of Nature is such that 
only those essentials constantly in use may be 
long retained in perfection. Thus at the end of 
a few hundred thousand years (more or less) 
the inhabitants of our island would have evolved 
two separate types. Darwin says, " Whatever 
the cause may be of each slight difference in the 
offspring from their parents (and a cause for 
each must exist), it is the steady accumulation, 
through natural selection, of such differences, 
when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise 

73 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

to all the more important modifications of struc- 
ture, by which the innumerable beings on the 
face of the earth are enabled to struggle with 
each other, and the best adapted to survive." 

Now let us take a hare or a rabbit of any 
species and compare it at different ages with the 
other rodents and then with the smaller mem- 
bers of the cat tribe. Although the rodent family 
is by far the largest order of mammals on the 
earth, both as regards the number of species and 
of individuals, and is thickly distributed in all 
latitudes where animal life is found, I believe 
that outside of the rabbit , family there is not a 
single instance of a rodent having more than two 
incisors in each jaw, nor one in which the feet 
are completely covered with thick fur which hides 
the claws. Practically all other rodents use the 
feet like hands for grasping things, the feet of 
squirrels, mice and beavers being typical of the 
race. Rabbits and hares have five toes on the 
fore feet and four on the hind feet, just as all 

74 



HARES AND RABBITS 

cats do under normal conditions (the six- and 
seven-toed domestic cats are merely freaks). 
Among the rodents four toes on the fore feet 
and five behind appears to be the general rule, 
though some species have four or even less on 
each foot, while a beaver has five on each foot. 
I cannot recall an instance where the number cor- 
responds with that of the cats and rabbits. Like 
the cat, also, hares and rabbits have the eye fur- 
nished with a nictitating membrane, which may 
be drawn over the eye voluntarily while the eye- 
lids are still open. 

A marked feature of the rodent family is found 
in the structure of the teeth. Outside of the 
rabbit family, all rodents have the incisors coated 
with hard enamel on the front only, thus allow- 
ing the soft dentine to wear down fastest behind 
and keeping a constantly sharpened chisel-like 
cutting edge in front. Among hares and rabbits 
we find the incisors furnished to a certain extent 
with enamel on both sides like the teeth of the 

75 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

flesh eaters, the result being that they do not 
wear to so keen an edge as do the teeth of the 
other rodents. The short tail of the rabbit may 
be accounted for in either of two ways: that the 
race of cats from which they were an offshoot 
belonged to the tribe of short-tailed lynxes, like 
the American wildcat or " bob cat," or that in 
escaping pursuit through bushes and brambles a 
longer tail would prove not only useless but a 
menace to safety and in time become diminished 
through the process of the survival of the fittest. 
Thus we find in the hares and rabbits precisely 
the type of animal which might be logically ex- 
pected as the outcome of natural selection in a 
race of cats compelled to exist on a vegetable 
diet, and at the same time avoid the pursuit of 
a larger race of cats, under just such conditions 
as may be found on many a little island off the 
coast. Having once adapted themselves to the 
changed condition of things, they would undoubt- 
edly hold their own and multiply, until in the 

76 




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HARES AND RABBITS 

course of seasonal or climatic changes some of 
their number would find a way to the main land, 
where, like the hares and cats of our own time, 
their rapid increase and natural inclination to 
migrate when overcrowded would in time disperse 
them to all quarters of the globe. Those ac- 
quired characteristics, which had enabled them 
to survive under privations, would continue to be 
of service in the struggle for existence wherever 
their migrations led them. The jack rabbit of 
the plains and the marsh hare of the south and 
the various hares and rabbits of the Old World, 
all exhibit certain highly developed characteris- 
tics which alike prove useful in the struggle, 
whether found in the little cottontail, or the white- 
coated polar hare that holds its own through the 
long arctic winter, well inside the Arctic Circle, 
and might easily be imagined to have crossed 
Behring straits from Siberia on the ice during 
some long passed winter of glacial cold. 

And wherever you find them, north or south, 

79 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

you may observe certain superficial peculiarities 
that to the most casual observer appear to sug- 
gest a kind of relationship to the cats. The 
round, full eye, with its black iris, might well be 
a cat's eye, darkened and modified along with 
other changes; the furry feet silently tripping 
over dry grass and twigs; the lank, " slab-sided " 
body and narrow hips, all so unlike our other 
common rodents. And if you should succeed 
in laying hands on the timid, big-eyed, furry 
thing, you would find that instead of using its 
incisors, as other rodents do, the long hind legs 
with their diminished, but not altogether useless 
claws, would be brought into play precisely as 
an angry cat scratches the one who has seized it, 
and at the same time you would be very likely 
to hear a weak, pitiful scream, more like the cry 
of an injured kitten than like that of any rodent. 
In this connection it is to be remarked as cer- 
tainly a little singular (though hardly to be ac- 
cepted as scientific evidence) that the flesh of cats 

80 



HARES AND RABBITS 

and rabbits is said to be so very similar in qual- 
ity, that innkeepers in Europe are not infre- 
quently convicted of substituting the one for the 
other without any imposition being suspected by 
their guests. 





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Chapter III 
Woodchucks 

]\/[dY 21 , iqii. — For the past month I have 
been hard at work out of doors for some- 
thing like twelve hours each day, the continued 
dry weather not permitting even one rainy day for 
writing. My work in the fields and pastures 
during this time has given me glimpses of the 
little wild beasts from time to time, but no chance 
for leisurely observation. Yesterday while har- 
rowing the corn land I saw four deer (all bucks) 
cross the pasture, stopping to browse in the 
grove at the edge of the field and then on again 

85 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

across the meadows, with white tails flicking in 
the wind. 

The spring work is now pretty well along and 
this morning I took my fishing rod for a few 
hours' idle still-fishing in Old River, as a good 
commencement to a period of observation of wild 
life and a return to work at my desk. Follow- 
ing the reedy margin, I skirted a bushy knoll and 
came quite unexpectedly upon a group of little 
beasts busy with their own spring work. First 
I saw among the thick undergrowth on the steep 
bank a grizzly, gray woodchuck standing erect 
in his doorway. His attitude of mimicry of a 
mossy stump was so perfect that I doubt if a 
camera would have shown him as anything else; 
I stood watching him as he watched me for sev- 
eral minutes without detecting the slightest move- 
ment on his part. Hearing the sound of scratch- 
ing claws overhead, I looked up, to see a second 
woodchuck scrambling up the trunk of a willow; 
he ran up the nearly perpendicular stem with at 

86 



WOODCHUCKS 

least the agility of a raccoon, though the tree at 
that height was scarcely bigger than his body and 
with bark hardly beginning to roughen as yet 
with the cracking of age. Reaching an out- 
growing branch he rested his shoulder in the 
crotch, and turning his head looked down at me 
with one gleaming black eye, the sunlight falling 
through the leaves flecking his reddish tawny fur 
as the wind ruffled it. On his back and flanks 
were two marks which looked like scars made 
by shot perhaps, or the claws of a hawk, or pos- 
sibly by teeth in some encounter in which he came 
off victor. A little way out in the stream a 
group of trees had been uprooted by storm or 
freshet, heaving up the muddy bottom to form 
a bulwark higher than my head. I climbed to 
the top of this and seated there overlooked a 
stretch of open water bordered with bulrushes 
on three sides and the sloping bank on the other; 
beneath the bank I could see where a muskrat 
had been at work, the clay from his digging still 

87 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

roiling the water. A pickerel hung motionless 
almost beneath me ; a few lazy barvel swam aim- 
lessly about and painted turtles poked striped 
heads out of water to blink at me inquiringly; 
red-wing blackbirds hovered and whistled around 
me, a rail cried among the rushes and a hawk 
screamed in the forest. Suddenly Mr. Mus- 
quash came out from among the roots almost 
under my feet and swam across the open water 
to his work beneath the bank, muddying the water 
as he threw up clods of reed roots and sodden 
vegetation mixed with clay and sediment. Then 
he came to the surface and swam toward me, 
stopping within a few yards to float with back 
and tail along the surface, and stared at me with 
beady eyes, sniffing with questioning nostrils to 
identify the thing he saw above him; then with 
sudden plunge was gone down into the muddy 
depths. The pickerel not six feet away remained 
unmoved beyond the rocking motion given him 
by the disturbed water. 



WOODCHUCKS 

A little later a snapping turtle as big as a soup 
tureen poked his ugly snout out into the air, saw 
me and paddled a little nearer, with his mud- 
stained shell just awash and clumsy paddling feet 
holding him in position against the slow moving 
water. 

The spring day had grown warm; the wood- 
chuck in the willow climbed down and disap- 
peared in the undergrowth and the other retired 
to his underground den. A comparatively quiet 
and unmolested life these two woodchucks must 
have here on their sunny, south-sloping bank with 
the muskrat for next-door neighbor; almost a 
sub-tenant as it were, for his doorway is directly 
under theirs and scarcely ten feet away, and as 
his hole penetrates up into the bank to above 
high water level, while theirs descends, the under- 
ground chambers of the two must be very near 
together. Here within this elbow of Old River 
they have perhaps a quarter acre of thicket to 
forage in; pine and swamp oak and elm, with 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

one gnarly apple tree to give them sour fruit in 
its season. Along the waterside a tangled growth 
of alders and willows, and beyond these acres 
and acres of flags and rushes, then flat clay pas- 
ture land overgrown with ground junipers, stretch- 
ing away in all directions to the pine covered 
highland, and not a house or patch of cultivated 
land for miles around; the only noise of civiliza- 
tion to disturb them the faint, distant sound of 
cars, and in the spring the whining saw-mill far- 
ther down the stream. For neighbors they have 
besides the muskrat, dwelling in their river 
bank, a family of red squirrels to share their 
secluded thicket, and across the river, two or 
three hundred yards away, are a dozen wood- 
chuck burrows inhabited by various tenants as 
the seasons come and go. Probably their most 
dangerous foes are the foxes living on the pine 
covered slopes who make their favorite hunting 
grounds the low reed-grown river banks and 
meadows. 

90 



WOODCHUCKS 

Fancy the simple, everyday life of these wood- 
chucks; peering out of their doorway each morn- 
ing at daybreak, motionless, listening and look- 
ing until satisfied that no immediate danger 
threatens before starting out to forage for their 
breakfast. For an hour or more they may busy 
themselves browsing on the short grass and tender 
green shoots of the undergrowth or the sweet- 
flags growing along the water's edge. Their 
water supply is unfailing, and after having satis- 
fied both hunger and thirst, they may pass the 
remainder of the morning dozing in the sun. 
Just how family affairs are arranged with them 
is not easy to determine; often a number of 
grown woodchucks dwell in the same burrow; 
as a rule the mother woodchuck has a burrow of 
her own in which to rear her young, but her care 
for them ends long before they are half grown; 
when only a few weeks old she turns them adrift 
to forage for themselves, a task for which they 
are perfectly capable. They are equally well able 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

to defend themselves and are ready and eager 
to fight any foe that comes along, After a few 
weeks of irresponsible wandering (during which 
time they must evidently take shelter in any 
chance nook or hollow they may find) they make 
their first attempt at digging a hole for them- 
selves; usually this is but a few feet in depth 
and with only one opening and seldom inhabited 
by them for more than a week or two. Before 
cold weather comes on most of them find and 
appropriate some long-established burrow with 
its underground tunnel and hidden back door. It 
is an odd phase of Nature's economy that (here 
in New England at least) the woodchucks should 
hold the contract to construct underground homes 
for so many of their neighbors. The fox, the 
rabbit, the mink and weasel, as well as all sorts 
of wild mice, depend upon them in this capacity; 
even the skunk (though a most efficient digger 
of burrows himself) is oftenest found living in 
one originally made by a woodchuck. For a 

92 



WOODCHUCKS 

rough guess I should say there are at least five 
hundred woodchuck burrows scattered over every 
square mile of field and forest in this region; 
a pretty large proportion of these I know for a 
fact to have been made twenty-five years or more 
and to have been inhabited by one small beast 
or another almost every season since. It is quite 
possible that some of these were dug before the 
days of the early settlers. 

Each season sees a few new and elaborate bur- 
rows dug here and there by certain enterprising 
and energetic woodchucks, most of them to be 
abandoned after a few weeks, or at most a sea- 
son's occupation, because of some defect of soil 
or drainage; when, however, it chances to be 
satisfactorily located in every respect, any one of 
these new-dug holes may prove to be a perma- 
nent underground home. The forest may grow 
up about it and again be cleared away, it may 
be buried deep with fallen brush or exposed to 
the day-long glare of the sun, but, year in and 

93 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

year out, it will be suited to the needs of some 
little : beast or other and through continued oc- 
cupation remain in existence longer than many 
a. pretentious human dwelling. 

The young woodchuck starting out in life looks 
first in at one hole and then another; finds one 
inhabited by a skunk, another by a rabbit family 
or by one of his own race; finding one without 
an occupant he enters cautiously, pushing aside 
the roots of grass and vines that are choking the 
entrance, and makes his way along the under- 
ground passage, here and there partly filled by 
the caving in of the earth or the upheaval of the 
frost; finding things to his taste he clears out 
the nest chamber and gathers grass or leaves and 
pine needles for a new nest and literally makes 
himself at home. There appears to be a wide 
range of taste among different individuals re- 
garding the choice of a location, one makes his 
home by the water-side, another has his beneath 
the roots of an old tree in the swamp. 

94 



WOODCHUCKS 

The hillside forest, the sunlit, boulder-dotted 
pasture land, the cultivated fields, the brier-grown 
roadside, — everywhere you will find them. A 
tumbledown stone wall bordering an old orchard 
is perhaps the favorite resort, though a south- 
sloping hillside with old pine stumps and mossy 
boulders is also a very popular situation with 
them. Take my own farm for example; in the 
stone wall bordering the roadside there are half 
a dozen woodchuck holes, and in the wall be- 
tween my field and my neighbor's are at least 
as many more. In the field itself from season to 
season and at more or less irregular intervals the 
holes are ploughed over and so are of necessity 
of a more transient nature, new ones being dug 
each season where clover or beans or garden 
vegetables are most promising, and sooner or 
later abandoned according to circumstances. In 
the pine grove in the corner of the field there 
are four or five burrows that have been in ex- 
istence since my boyhood, as is also true of not 

95 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

less than a dozen of those in the pasture. The 
low swampy woodlot is not so well suited to the 
woodchuck's taste, yet even there I find their 
holes wherever a sloping bank offers a chance 
for drainage. The only land of mine where 
woodchucks do not dwell is the tide-swept salt 
meadow by the sea. Now no one ever accused 
me of encouraging woodchucks; on the contrary 
I keep up a pretty steady warfare against them 
with steel trap, rifle and shot-gun, and congratu- 
late myself upon having fewer woodchucks than 
some of my neighbors. There is at least this 
compensation for having your land inhabited by 
woodchucks, — that they yield a very interest- 
ing and perfectly legitimate form of sport at a 
season when other shooting is prohibited. 

The woodchuck tribe holds its own by means 
of boldness and audacity, combined with a cer- 
tain shrewd caution backed up by a physical 
toughness and vigor to compensate for lack of 
fleetness. Early in the season, while the grass is 

9 6 



WOODCHUCKS 

yet short and offers but scanty concealment, most 
of them live in holes hidden to a certain degree 
among bushes and rocks and bramble patches 
along the stone walls or the borders of thickets 
and woodland. In June many of them, both old 
and young, have their abiding places in the hay 
and grain fields, preferring clover and tall herds- 
grass; here they dig temporary burrows, throw- 
ing out their heaps of loose earth and trampling 
down a considerable space on all sides. In this 
hidden retreat they luxuriate and fatten until hay- 
ing time. When the hay fields are cleared some 
of them retire to the border of the fields, where 
they have the advantage of both cultivated land 
and thicket. Others seek the shelter of the corn, 
where they dig new homes for themselves, and 
by breaking down the tall growing stalks obtain 
many a satisfying meal. Mr. Woodchuck makes 
no attempt at concealing the main entrance to 
his domicile, the heap of new earth thrown out 
being often conspicuous at a distance, but nearly 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

always there is a back entrance cleverly hidden 
in thick grass or weeds and with no scattered 
earth to betray its location. 

Often a burrow of long standing has four or 
five different openings at distances of a rod or 
more from each other and connected by well- 
trodden paths. Woodchucks do not depend upon 
twilight or darkness for concealment in their 
transgressions, seldom being abroad much before 
sunrise or after sunset, and seeming to prefer 
bright weather. Under the hot midsummer noon 
they love to lie sprawling half asleep on the 
warm earth or stretched out along a fence rail 
or a sun heated rock. Toward the close of the 
summer the greater part of their time is passed 
in this manner, their principal object now being 
to get fat. In the autumn they are less fre- 
quently seen abroad, and by the first of Novem- 
ber the majority of them have retired to their 
winter dens in the woods. Their winter sleep is 
a most complete hibernation lasting six months or 

98 



WOODCHUCKS 

more, according to individual degrees of fatness. 
In March a few of them come out of their dens 
into a world of snow and cold where forage of 
the sort that woodchucks like is very scarce. As 
far as my own observation goes their first act 
on coming above ground is to taste the resinous 
bark of an evergreen, pine or cedar or spruce; 
very likely this has a corrective effect after their 
long fast. What they still have left of their 
wasted supply of fat rapidly diminishes; a very 
few days of meager picking among snowdrifts 
and half thawed turf reduces them to a condi- 
tion of leanness and activity which puts them on 
a footing to face the hardships of a wintry world. 
There is for them no choice of weather now. 
The skunk, the raccoon and the bear have gen- 
erally a sufficient supply of fat to carry them over 
a few days of imprisonment while the inclement 
weather lasts, but apparently the woodchuck 
wakes only when his fat is about used up. He 
lays up no stores for winter, and if he is so un- 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

fortunate as to be forced aboveground before 
spring has come, must face the blizzard's cold 
and the driven snow in order to pick up here and 
there a green leaf among the drifts. As spring 
comes on more and more woodchucks awake 
from their long sleep; the last of April finds 
most of them abroad, though I am inclined to 
think that not a few of them continue their hiber- 
nation until well into May. 

All the smaller hunting animals are of direct 
benefit to man because of the great numbers of 
mice and insects which they destroy. There is 
a question of the wisdom of reducing the num- 
ber of any species beyond a certain point, but as 
far as man's material welfare is concerned I am 
inclined to think that the race of woodchucks 
would not be missed though entirely exterminated 
from the land. It is true that they eat grass- 
hoppers and crickets in a small way, also that 
the flesh of young woodchucks of the season is 
eatable, being not unlike lamb, though an old 

ioo 



WOODCHUCKS 

one might well defy the appetite of a starving 
Indian. The skin too can be tanned into fine 
leather almost equal to buckskin, but the crops 
ruined by one family of the greedy and wasteful 
little beasts in a single season might almost be 
said to offset any benefit derived from the entire 
race since the beginning. However, the question 
of exterminating them is hopeless even if this were 
desirable; enough if we can keep their numbers 
in check. 

They are of the class which appears to flour- 
ish under persecution. Not so very many years 
ago the State of New Hampshire offered a re- 
ward of ten cents per tail for all woodchucks 
killed within the state, yet without any very per- 
ceptible diminution of the supply of woodchucks. 
Since then the farmers have adopted the method 
of asphyxiating them in their dens by the use of 
carbon disulphide, and while some claim to have 
temporarily cleared their fields of the pests in 
this way, some of their neighbors take the view 

IOI 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

that the woodchucks instead of being smothered 
in their beds, are merely evicted and forced to 
move to other hunting grounds. One man re- 
ported that in order to determine the results of 
this method, he dug out a large number of holes 
where the chemical had been used and found 
only one dead chuck to show for it. It is only too 
evident that we shall never lack for woodchucks. 
Undoubtedly in the days to come, when our hill- 
side farms and uplands have become too arid for 
profitable agriculture, and serve only as house lots, 
forest reserves or woodland, and our lowlands 
and swamps have been turned into one continuous 
market garden, the neighborly little groundhogs 
will still continue their depredations, demanding 
toll of the farmers' earliest crops, in defiance of 
all his elaborate schemes for their extermination. 
The marmot family, of which the woodchuck 
is a good representative, is found all round the 
world in northern latitudes. The marmot and 
the bobac of northern Europe and Asia are much 

102 



WOODCHUCKS 

more social and gregarious in their habits. Like 
the prairie dogs, which are also true marmots, 
they live in colonies, but unlike the prairie dogs 
they prefer mountainous and hilly regions, as do 
the marmots of the extreme western portions of 
this country. 

The common woodchuck is an inhabitant of 
most of our northeastern states. In Canada and 
Labrador he is much darker in color, often 
nearly black. There is a black variety not un- 
common in some parts of New England which 
seems to be quite distinct from the common 
sort, the fur being much softer, dull black on 
the hindquarters, more or less grizzled about 
the shoulders and gray on the cheeks. I have 
never known them to associate with the others, 
and have found them of a wilder, more retiring 
nature. The common woodchucks vary greatly 
in color through different shades of gray and 
rusty brown. I have seen them almost white, 
and one that was pale straw color all over. 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

September j, ipu. — One of the longest 
droughts ever recorded in this part of the world, 
shows signs at last of giving way to more normal 
weather conditions. We have not had an old- 
fashioned three days' rain in the last four years, 
and only a very few heavy rainfalls of even a 
few hours' duration. The water in wells and 
springs has been getting lower season for sea- 
son; of a dozen springs on my land only two 
continue to flow. Two of three brooks were com- 
pletely dry at midsummer, and the third was dry 
except for about one hundred yards below the 
springs that feed it. One brook which my grand- 
father once told me never failed but once in all 
his eighty years, and then only for a few days, 
has been dry now for very nearly a year. In 
the hot weeks of July, when for fourteen succes- 
sive days the mean temperature was 8o° at sun- 
rise and 94 at midday, and on half the days 
rose to above ioo° in the shade, even the large 
streams dried up, except where the water stood in 

104 



WOODCHUCKS 

deep holes. To my surprise, the habits of the 
woodchiicks appeared to be more affected by 
the extreme dryness than were those of the other 
wild animals. In the spring they had been as 
abundant as usual, but as the drought increased 
they disappeared and for weeks I saw none of 
them. The natural inference would be that they 
had gone to the swamps and such places along 
the beds of streams as the water still lingered 
in, but I failed to find any evidence of this being 
the case either in their tracks or newly opened 
burrows. The only one that I saw during this 
time was on high land, a big dark-colored old 
fellow, searching for fallen pears at the edge of 
an orchard. The very last of July we had a 
gulf storm; three inches of rain with a north- 
easterly gale, filling the streams and lowlands. 
Immediately after this rain I began to see wood- 
chucks in their old haunts, and since then they 
have been much in evidence. Can it be possible 
that, as has been suggested of the jumping mice, 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

they have the power of voluntarily hibernating 
during such periods of water famine? Take him 
all in all, Mr. Woodchuck is pretty thoroughly 
well able to look out for himself. As compared 
with other wild animals he is not swift of foot, 
particularly when burdened with his load of fat 
in the late summer and fall, but as a rule he is 
seldom obliged to go far from his den in search 
of food, and can make fairly good speed in a 
short run. Neither is he an expert at climbing 
or swimming, though I have more than once seen 
him climb trees to a considerable height, and on 
other occasions have seen him both swim and 
dive, or at least plunge and swim for several 
yards under water. When cornered he can fight 
like a bulldog, and often owes his safety to his 
prowess in battle. When his hole is dug out he 
digs off through the soil, filling up the hole be- 
hind him as he goes in a way that makes it ex- 
tremely difficult to follow him. 



106 




Chapter IV 
Chipmunk 



PHIS morning I saw the first chipmunk of the 
season, at least the first that I have seen, 
though undoubtedly some of them have been out 
of their holes for weeks. I usually see them as 
early as the last week in March; sometimes even 
in February: once only in January, and that was 
fifteen years ago. 

We had been having a cold wave with but little 
snow on the ground. One still, clear, zero morn- 
ing I started out for a long tramp across country 
and it proved to be a day of unseasonable sur- 
prises for me. My object that day was to follow 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

and study out the tracks of a colony of northern 
hares over on Pine Hill three or four miles away; 
the last stronghold of the northern hares in the 
vicinity. 

Rabbits, foxes and red squirrels were the only 
little beasts that I expected to find abroad in such 
weather, and for birds, titmice, jays, grosbeaks, 
crossbills and snowbuntings, with partridges and 
a snowy owl or goshawk perhaps. I had scarcely 
gone a quarter of a mile from the house, when 
right in the home pasture at the edge of a little 
boggy spring hole, I found a Wilson snipe feed- 
ing, probing the unfrozen black mud for water 
insects of one sort or another. 

Such occurrences in the very heart of a New 
Hampshire winter give one a strange sensation of 
overturned seasons. Later in the day I was to 
have a yet more unusual reminder of summer 
time. The sun was low in the western sky as I 
made my way towards home along a narrow wood 
road bounded by tumbledown stone walls. I can 

1 08 



CHIPMUNK 

see now just how the thin red sunlight at the close 
of the winter day brightened the dry oak leaves 
where the wind had gathered them together on 
the slope of a rocky knoll, and right there, as if 
it were midsummer instead of midwinter, was a 
little striped-backed chipmunk amid the rustling 
leaves, a bit of Indian summer with snow and 
winter all around. With all the other chipmunks 
and the woodchucks fast asleep in their dens, and 
the summer birds long ago flown south, here was 
this one plucky little chipmunk, and the lone 
Wilson snipe by the unfrozen bog in the pasture. 
Chipmunks are tender little beasts and very 
much averse to cold weather, as a rule, yet the 
species, in one variety or another, ranges well up 
into northern latitudes the world around, having 
learned that a burrow with a chamber below the 
frost line is warm and cosy, whatever the climate 
may be above ground. In cold, raw weather, at 
any season of the year, they keep to their dens 
for the greater part of the day, only venturing 

in 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

out of doors when they feel the necessity of 
gathering food. If the sun shines brightly, even 
though the March or November winds are cold 
and rough, you may see the pretty striped backs 
along the sheltered southern slopes where the 
wind fails to make itself felt. The gray stones 
of an old tumbledown pasture wall are a favorite 
haunt of theirs in such weather, particularly if a 
wind-break of young evergreens has sprung up, 
as so often happens in old pasture land. Here, 
where the ground is soft and the grass kept close- 
cropped by sheep or cattle, the chipmunks dig 
their holes. They have learned a way of hid- 
ing the openings to their underground homes, 
Nature, or evolution, assisting them by the be- 
stowal, on every chipmunk, of a pair of most ser- 
viceable cheek pouches or pockets extending back 
as far as the shoulders. If you have ever watched 
the little chap stuffing one walnut after another 
into these capacious pouches, until he looks like 
some weird, deformed little dwarf of German 

112 



CHIPMUNK 

forest tale, you already know their usefulness in 
the rush of the fall harvesting. Earlier in the 
season they were in use for another purpose than 
that of carrying nuts and acorns. 

The chipmunk wants his doorway where he can 
see without being seen. If he hid it among the 
tall grass and weeds his outlook would be ob- 
structed and weasel or snake might lie there in 
ambush to waylay him, so he chooses the most 
open and lawnlike spot that he can find, where the 
slope of the land is right to carry off the water 
in rainy weather. He makes the opening through 
the turf very small and enlarges it as soon as he 
gets an inch below the surface. Every particle 
of earth that he digs out he stuffs into his cheek 
pouches, and so burdened goes off to some chosen 
hiding place to unload. Careful search in the 
neighborhood of every borrow will reveal a 
dumping ground, with perhaps half a peck or 
more of newly dug earth in one heap, The selec- 
tion of every such dumping ground bespeaks intel- 

"3 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

ligence in the individual as well as in the species, 
I find them sometimes among the stones of an 
old wall, again in a hollow stump or log or between 
the roots of a tree; oftener yet beneath the 1ow t 
spreading boughs of a young evergreen or in the 
midst of a thick clump of weeds and brambles, 
and often rods away from the spot where the hole 
is being dug. 

The chipmunk has little paths leading away in 
different directions, but never disclosing the exact 
position of his doorway, the grass around it being 
almost always undisturbed and untrodden by his 
feet. Watch him when he comes home with his 
load of nuts, and you will see him stop at the end 
of his path and sit bolt upright, looking about in all 
directions; then, if he thinks himself unobserved, 
he takes a sudden leap over the untrodden grass 
between the termination of his path and his door- 
way, and disappears from sight. On coming out 
again, he at first brings only the very top of his 
head into view, the position of his eyes enabling 

114 



CHIPMUNK 

him to see all about him while in this position. 
Then in order to see a little farther away, he 
raises himself a bit higher, but even now it takes 
a sharp eye to detect him, for his russet fur blends 
with his chosen surroundings to perfection, the 
striping of his head and back simulating the sur- 
rounding grass stems and their shadows so beauti- 
fully, that even in the brilliant sunshine you might 
look closely at him and scarcely guess his identity. 

Chipmunks are very commonly known as striped 
or ground squirrels, though true squirrels they 
certainly are not, being much more nearly related 
to the woodchucks and the so-called striped gopher 
of the plains. 

Their ability to climb is but little more than that 
possessed by the woodchucks. In the autumn 
season, it is true, they may at times be seen well 
up among the boughs of nut-bearing trees, but 
there is no exhibition of that reckless agility so 
characteristic of the true squirrels. I have never 
found them living in any other than an under- 

ii5 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

ground home, though this is often dug beneath 
the roots of an old tree, whose hollow trunk 
gives easy climbing by a sort of winding stair- 
way to fissures or knot holes, out of which the 
chipmunk likes to poke his head as out of a 
window. 

The chipmunk is one of the most efficient and 
generally practical little characters to be found in 
the woodland. His resources are many and 
varied. Disliking cold weather as he does, he 
makes double preparation to avoid the necessity 
of being out in it. 

His underground home comprises not only a 
snug living-room with plenty of soft dry grass for 
a bed, but a capacious granary as well. This 
is a separate chamber, and pretty certain to 
be well packed with seeds, nuts, acorns, beech- 
nuts, corn, buckwheat, barley or oats before win- 
ter has set in. Yet, evidently seeing the possi- 
bility of short commons in the early spring, if he 
indulges his appetite all winter long, he makes 

116 



CHIPMUNK 

a practice of sleeping for weeks or even months 
during his winter confinement, thus saving his 
stock of provender for the time when it will be 
more needed, for early spring is really a time 
of greater privation for little beasts who feed on 
seeds and grain than are the icebound months of 
midwinter. 

Whenever we have warm sunny days of the 
southwest wind at the end of winter, the chip- 
munks look out of their doorways for a breath 
of fresh air. In sheltered nooks where the sun 
warms the brown earth, they may be seen poking 
about among the russet leaves of the last autumn, 
searching for seeds or nuts overlooked in the har- 
vesting, or perhaps for dormant or half-waked 
grasshoppers, insects forming a considerable por- 
tion of their diet at any season when they are to 
be found. I have seen them spring and catch the 
big banded winged locusts as they hover with 
rustling wings in the hot August air. 

When a chipmunk has succeeded in capturing 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

and killing one of these big fellows, a feat in 
which both paws and teeth are called into vigor- 
ous action, he sits bolt upright grasping his victim 
in both hands, as a small boy holds a banana, and 
nibbling eagerly away at it until only wings and 
legs are left. In comparison to his size, he has 
made a meal about equal to what a whole roast 
chicken would be to one of us, but after it is fin- 
ished, he is generally as eager to get another as he 
was before. They also assay their luck on larger 
game at times. I have seen them hunting full- 
fledged sandpipers along the shores of a mill 
pond, and sparrows in the grass, but always 
without success, so far as my own observation 
goes, though this is not sufficient to class them as 
unsuccessful hunters generally, for even among 
the most skillful wild hunters you will 'witness a 
score or more of failures, before you may mark 
one successful kill, and with chipmunks, hunting 
is only a side issue at most. 

Undoubtedly they do occasionally succeed in 

118 



CHIPMUNK 

killing small birds that are learning to fly, while 
nests containing eggs or unfledged young must 
often furnish them a meal, though any destruction 
wrought by them in this way ought hardly to 
count against them more than when the farmer 
robs a hen's nest for its eggs, or kills an occasional 
chicken for his dinner, nor is the harm they do the 
farmers' crops ever very serious. They get most 
of their living from the forest; nuts — particu- 
larly beechnuts — and acorns, and such seeds as 
can be stored and kept through the cold weather, 
are what they chiefly depend upon. Strawberries, 
bunchberries, partridgeberries, blueberries and 
blackberries keep them supplied with fruit in the 
warm season. In the spring planting time they 
make trips to the corn field for the purpose of 
digging up the newly planted seed, and each 
autumn they claim their share of the harvest, 
to be carried away and stored along with their 
nuts. 

When the apples and pears and cherries begin 

119 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

to get ripe in the orchard they gorge themselves 
on the juicy fruit, also wild grapes and the fruit 
of the hackberry and gumtree. They prefer to 
gather the ripe fruit after it has fallen, but at 
times climb to a considerable height when unable 
to find what they want on the ground. 

From what I have observed I am inclined to 
think they are but little given to wandering, pre- 
ferring rather to live in the same locality and in 
the same hole year after year. They are very 
social; where you find one family of them dwell- 
ing, you may be pretty sure that there are others 
nearby. Each is dependent upon all the rest for 
timely warning when danger of any sort threatens, 
their sharp " chip," constantly repeated, carries 
far through the woods in still weather, and the 
approach of the most stealthy enemy is heralded 
while he is yet far away. A sudden attack, like 
the swoop of a hawk, calls forth a shrill gurgling 
cry of alarm, as the little chap makes his terrified 
dash for the safety of stone wall or burrow. 

120 



CHIPMUNK 

I have never known more than one family to 
live in the same hole, and whether, in time of des- 
perate danger, a chipmunk would dare resort to 
any hole except his own, I am unable to say. 

I remember one that I caught in a box trap 
and kept in a cage for a few days, then carried 
back and released within a few yards of the place 
where I caught him, and quite close to the hole 
which I supposed he had occupied. Whether this 
really was his hole or not, I cannot say, for 
though he popped into it at once on being re- 
leased, his stay was very short indeed, hardly 
a second had elapsed before two chipmunks 
emerged from the opening, fighting like two little 
bulldogs ; over and over they rolled almost at my 
feet, then separated with equal suddenness, one 
darting back into the hole, and the other away for 
the woods, but which was the rightful owner was 
still a puzzle. Was the one that I had kept in 
captivity justly punishing an interloper who had 
taken possession of his home during his absence, 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

or was he himself receiving due chastisement for 
daring to enter the hole belonging to another? 

Chipmunks are easily tamed, but it is cruelty to 
keep them long in captivity. I have never had the 
heart to do so for more than a few days, they 
always seem so miserably unhappy, and so glad 
of their freedom when released. I recall, when 
a boy, setting a box trap beside a stone wall at 
the edge of the woods. The season for cutting 
and stacking the hay on the salt marshes came 
on; starting away early each morning and get- 
ting home tired each night caused me to forget 
the box trap for a day or two. When I did 
think of it I immediately went there and found 
a chipmunk imprisoned inside. He had eaten 
the apple which was the bait and had probably 
been without food or drink for twenty-four hours 
or more. 

I transferred him to a cage and offered him 
bread and apples and water, which he took from 
my hand without the least sign of fear, and I have 

122 



CHIPMUNK 

often wondered if his experience at that time in 
any way lessened his natural fear of men and boys 
in general. 

Chipmunks are such impulsive little beasts that 
it is a wonder that they do not oftener find them- 
selves in trouble. I have seen one, scurrying along 
the ground towards its hole at the foot of an oak 
tree around which a flock of sheep were sleeping, 
run along a sheep's back in order to reach its 
doorway quicker, and suspect that if it had been 
dog, fox or wildcat sleeping there, the chipmunk 
would have taken the same course. 

The chipmunk's strikingly marked fur with the 
alternating bands of black, russet and creamy 
white often arouses the very natural query, " why 
should this little animal, whose safety must often 
depend upon concealment, wear such a conspicu- 
ous coat?" As a matter of fact however the 
stripes are not at all easily seen at a little distance, 
and then only in certain lights, and when their 
wearer is motionless. By just what slow-working 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

law of evolution they were brought into being we 
may only guess; perhaps a careful computation 
of the comparative number of chipmunks that fall 
victims to enemies that look down for them from 
overhead, those that hunt them on their own 
level, and those which lie in ambush or follow on 
their trail, might give us the clew we are look- 
ing for. 

When in rapid motion, and the chipmunk is 
nearly always in rapid motion, the longitudinal 
bands of light and dark unquestionably have the 
effect of breaking up the continuity of colors. 

A mouse, a rabbit or a woodchuck, or any 
other small beast with fur of the same general 
tone throughout, is comparatively easy to see when 
running, though invisible to the casual observer 
as it crouches in hiding. The chipmunk, on the 
contrary, is really much more difficult to locate 
when in motion than when it is still. 

It is his habit never to go very far from some 
place of hiding, either his hole in the earth or an 

124 



CHIPMUNK 

old stone wall or the underbrush of the thicket, 
and when danger threatens, it is his quickness that 
he depends upon first of all. 

Whatever the reason for the chipmunk's stripes 
may be, they certainly bestow upon him both dis- 
tinction of appearance and real beauty, and at the 
same time evidently have not rendered him too 
conspicuous for his own good. The species was 
abundant, according to all accounts, at the time of 
the first settlers, having held its own against the 
attacks of wildcats, weasels and hawks for un- 
told generations, and undoubtedly dodged the 
flint-tipped arrow of the red-skinned boys, just 
as it dodges the stone of the schoolboy of to-day. 
In some parts of the Eastern States it is said 
to be less abundant of late years. For my own 
part I fail to notice any diminution in numbers, 
wherever my rambles or my day's work or my 
hunting or fishing may take me ; and while I should 
regret any lessening of their numbers, I can 
scarcely wish them to become very much more 

"5 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

abundant lest the damage worked by them might 
get to be serious enough to overbalance the pleas- 
ure of their company in the woods and along the 
roadsides. 

July 30th, igu. — This summer a family of 
chipmunks are living on our lawn. One might 
easily walk right over their doorway without see- 
ing it, so cleverly is it hidden in the short grass, 
just a little round hole hardly an inch in diameter 
at the surface of the ground. 

I first saw this pair of little striped-backs last 
autumn in corn harvesting time. They began 
digging their hole among the rocks of the bank 
wall of the barnyard, where the crevices between 
the stones gave them good hiding places, as well 
as a chance to hide the loose earth which they re- 
moved in their digging. Tunneling along under- 
ground, they evidently made their chamber and 
granary beneath the lawn, and from there dug a 
passage directly up to the surface, carrying all 
the earth in their cheek pouches back to the origi- 

126 



CHIPMUNK 

nal opening, and having the new opening through 
the short turf of the lawn only just large enough 
for them to squeeze through. In the warm Indian- 
summer days of last autumn, while I was husking 
the corn, I saw them making frequent trips back 
and forth from the corn bin to their hole in the 
wall, their cheek pouches well filled. They also 
gathered hickory nuts and butter-nuts and buck- 
wheat, and undoubtedly put in an ample supply 
for the winter. From November to April they 
were hidden away underground and I saw noth- 
ing of them, but after the first of April I saw 
them day after day, running along the stone wall 
or skipping across the lawn or paying an occa- 
sional visit to the corn bin. 

On an unlucky day in haying time, Mr. Chip- 
munk met an untimely fate through inadvertently 
stepping into a rat trap in the barn. It was at 
about this time that I first began to see the little 
chipmunks, by then nearly half-grown, sunning 
themselves on the warm gray stones of the barn- 

129 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

yard wall, or running about to pick up the grain 
scattered for the hens. They would even enter 
the slatted coop where the mother hen hovered 
her flock of late chickens. Throughout the re- 
mainder of the summer and in the early autumn 
I saw them nearly every day, either busy with 
their harvesting, or sitting on the top rail of the 
fence enjoying the slowly failing sunlight of the 
season. 

October 20th, igu. — This morning while 
walking through some thick young growth, I saw 
a chipmunk run up a little oak tree only a few 
inches in diameter. On going close to the tree 
I could see him clinging fast to the stem almost 
at its summit and where it was, if anything, smaller 
than his body, though but little higher than my 
head. 

He looked as fat as a pig, and his cheek pouches 
were well stuffed with nuts or acorns. When I 
shook the tree gently he only clung the tighter, 
but on giving it a jar with my gunstock, I was 

130 



CHIPMUNK 

surprised to see Mr. Chipmunk most precipitately 
turn a handspring into the air and come down 
with a thump among the dry leaves at my feet, 
disappearing almost as he touched the ground. 
Right there where he had vanished, I found the 
doorway to his hole dug into the side of a little 
mossy hummock overgrown and hidden by winter- 
green and ivy. Evidently he had precipitated 
himself purposely, to fall as close as possible to 
his hole, and must have been all prepared for 
the jump when my gunstock jarred him from his 
perch. 

January 3, IQ12. — It is now midwinter and the 
frost-bound earth is covered with snow. I have 
not seen a chipmunk for nearly two months, but 
I know that down in their snug dens they are wait- 
ing the coming of spring. 



131 




Chapter V 

Brown Rat — House Mouse— Meadow 
Mouse — White-footed Wood Mouse 
— Jumping Mouse 

* j^ HE brown rat, like the brown mouse, is to be 
numbered among our undesirable immigrants 
from foreign lands. Tradition says that the 
brown rat came first from Norway, traveling 
either overland or in ships' holds, by way of The 
Netherlands to Great Britain and southern Eu- 
rope v and so in time across the Western Ocean 
to the New World, and everywhere in its wan- 
derings driving away the smaller and less ag- 

132 




< 

X 

z 

o 

<z 

CO 



BROWN RAT 

gressive black rat. Except from their own point 
of view, there would seem to be no very apparent 
reason for the existence of rats. As scavengers, 
they have proved to be the carriers of disease 
and pestilence; cats, foxes, skunks, etc., appear 
to eat them only under protest, evidently prefer- 
ing any other sort of meat. Men have fought 
them with traps, cats, poison, ferrets, terriers and 
fire, yet they still increase both in city and coun- 
try. On the farm they destroy grain and vege- 
tables and kill young chickens, besides undermin- 
ing the foundations of buildings and gnawing 
away the woodwork. 

The common steel trap I have found to be the 
most useful in combating them. A half dozen 
small steel traps set in their holes and runways 
and covered with chaff will in time work a con- 
siderable reduction in their numbers. It is im- 
possible to conceal a trap so carefully that an old 
rat will not be aware of its position; but rats 
are like humans, and in time are pretty sure to 

135 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

get careless and take risks; the chances are that 
sooner or later the slyest old rat will through 
sheer inadvertence run into some trap that he had 
been avoiding for weeks. Young rats are more 
easily outwitted and are often caught the first 
night. The large wire cage trap with a tunnel 
opening which admits a rat, yet at the same time 
effectually prevents his escape, is very apt to 
prove disappointing at first, but if kept well 
baited with some tempting viand, will in all prob- 
ability surprise you some fine morning with a 
whole family of prisoners behind its bars. The 
secret of success with this trap lies in a certain 
weakness common to both rats and men, and 
which often gets both into trouble; the trait of 
blindly following a leader. All the rats will usu- 
ally shun a cage trap for weeks, until one, a little 
bolder or more foolish than the rest, or hungrier, 
squeezes through the narrow passage, and once 
inside, regales himself on the bait; then other 
rats follow without fear or forethought, often 

136 



BROWN RAT 

until the trap is crowded. Only the other morn- 
ing my neighbor found sixteen rats in a trap of 
this sort, after it had been set for many days 
without result. At my uncle's a trap of this kind 
was set in an unused pigsty, and one morning 
was discovered at the farther side of the pen 
and stuffed with straw, and in this straw was 
hidden a whole family of rats. The only ex- 
planation that offered was that other rats had 
dragged the trap over to the straw pile and then 
stuffed the straw between the wires in order that 
the prisoners might conceal themselves. This 
spring I have been trapping rats about the barn, 
setting traps in their holes and runways beneath 
boards. The commonest trick by which the rats 
have defied me is to bury the trap with earth or 
chips; at times they have used weatherbeaten 
corn cobs or rotten wood for the purpose, shov- 
ing them onto the pan of the trap and springing 
it. Now, if the cobs had been fresh ones, it 
might very naturally be supposed that the rats 

137 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

were carrying them to their holes for the corn 
that was left on them, but these old weather- 
beaten cobs could be of no possible use to them, 
and I firmly believe that the rats knew that if 
put on the pan of the trap it would spring and 
become harmless. I find that the best plan in 
setting traps for rats is to have them in places 
where you can look at them two or three times 
a day without having to go out of your way in 
order to do so. In this manner it is possible to 
capture a surprising number of the pests in the 
course of a year. The white, or black and white 
rats, which make such amusing pets, are prob- 
ably albinos of the " Old English black rat," and 
will soon be, if they are not already, the only 
survivors of their race. In the opinion of natu- 
ralists generally the black rat was a native of 
India. From there, like the house mouse, it has 
been transported to all parts of the world, mul- 
tiplying exceedingly, and always more or less a 
dependent upon man's labors; living in ware- 

138 



BROWN RAT 

houses and graineries and pigsties and feeding 
upon the product of man's work. The brown rat 
is believed to be a native of China, and at a 
somewhat later period in history (probably in 
the eighteenth century) spread about the world 
as the black rat had done. Wherever it went it 
overcame and drove out the black rat, taking its 
place as a far more destructive and undesirable 
pest. The last stronghold of the black rat is 
said to be in certain South American countries, 
yet even there there is every reason to believe 
that the brown rat will soon follow it and rout 
it out as it has done elsewhere. In those tropical 
countries, however, the black rat has a slightly 
better chance of holding its own, being a native 
of warm climates, while the brown rat is a more 
typical northerner, thriving best in a cool climate. 
In western China there is found a rat that ap- 
pears to be identical with the common brown 
rat, though living in the wild lands and avoiding 
the habitations of men. This is believed to be 

139 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

the race from which our common brown rat had 
its origin; of this there is a possible doubt, how- 
ever, for here in the west we frequently find the 
brown rat living on the banks of rivers and in 
meadows far away from buildings and grain 
fields. Two years ago I had several stacks of 
hay left on the meadows all winter. The fol- 
lowing summer I noticed small holes and tunnels 
in the hay, and narrow paths leading thence 
to the creek nearby, and concluded that a mink 
and her family must be living there. The next 
winter I went with a horse sled to haul off the 
hay and found the stack still inhabited. As I 
pitched the last of the hay upon the load, a brown 
rat jumped down and scurried away across the 
ice and snow to hide behind a tilted ice cake at 
the edge of the creek; finding this rather too 
exposed a situation, he came back, evidently with 
the intention of taking refuge in the load of hay, 
but having more rats in my barn than I really 
needed I struck at him with my pitch fork and 

140 



BROWN RAT 

he retreated once more to the shelter of the ice 
cake. 

The tide from the sea was pushing up along 
the narrow creek and heaving up and breaking 
the ice as it came. A few minutes later, very- 
much to my surprise, I saw the rat dive into the 
icy water and swim over to the other bank; for 
a time he remained motionless at the edge of 
the shelving ice with just his head above water, 
then disappeared beneath the overhanging bank. 
What finally became of him I do not know, but 
his chances at the time seemed deplorably small: 
the last of the hay stacks gone from the ice bound 
meadows which stretched away for miles in all 
directions; the salt tide sweeping in from the 
ocean and hungry sea gulls wheeling about over- 
head. All the brown rats which I have found 
living in meadows and along river banks were 
alike in being smaller and more agile than those 
of the barns and stables, and with lighter colored, 
more yellowish gray fur; and I have found them 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

dwelling in these places at all seasons of the year, 
not merely as summer campers. 

When we were boys my cousin and I had two 
tame rats, one white with pink eyes, the other 
black and white with black eyes. They were very 
interesting, but got to be something of a nuisance, 
so that we determined to transport them to the 
woods and give them the chance of enjoying a 
free wild life. In a dry pine grove at the edge 
of the field we dug them a snug underground 
chamber roofed over with pine bark and dry earth 
and with a nest of soft grass. 

Here, with a good store of corn and other pro- 
visions and a spring nearby for water, we con- 
sidered them well provided for. It was then early 
summer and we felt certain that before cold 
weather they would have adapted themselves to 
life in the woods and be able to take care of them- 
selves. We believed that their danger from 
foxes and hawks and other wild hunters in the 
woods to be less than that from the cats if we 

142 



BROWN RAT 

had given them their liberty about the house 
and barn, and we were too merciful, I am glad 
to remember, to keep any creature in confine- 
ment for more than a day or two. Our rats 
enjoyed their new domicile in the woods for 
just as long as the food we had left with them 
lasted, then they returned to the house. The 
white rat became an intimate member of the 
family, having its home thereafter in the library, 
behind the books of a certain old bookcase. From 
there it made temporary excursions to all parts 
of the house either on its own feet or in the 
pocket or on the shoulder of some larger member 
of the family. 

When my father or brother was writing in the 
library, the white rat liked to crawl up inside his 
coat, and with its head poked out of collar or coat 
sleeve would watch the movement of the pen for 
hours in a sort of fascination. The black and 
white rat took up its abode in a crevice of the 
boards in the passage way between the wood-shed 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

and the work-shop, and exhibited an equal inter- 
est in every sort of work that was done there. 
At intervals the white rat would visit it, and in 
return it would come to the library, sometimes 
spending the entire day there. I recall on one 
occasion going into the library and seeing my 
brother writing at the desk with the white rat 
perched on his shoulder and the other peering out 
of a pigeon hole, each following the motion of 
the pen with interested eyes. The cats were given 
to understand that they must not molest these two 
rats of the household, and for nearly a year they 
dwelt there undisturbed; but finally, first one and 
then the other fell victim either to our own cats, or 
more likely to some stray cat of the neighborhood, 
and their loss was deeply felt by every member of 
the family, to which they had become attached. 

The common house mouse has made itself the 
humble companion of man all round the world 
in temperate latitudes, and wherever it goes its 

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HOUSE MOUSE 

mouse-gray coat has proved so inconspicuous and 
in every way serviceable that local variations ap- 
pear to be exceedingly rare. 

Mice make their homes wherever man does, 
and depend upon him not only for their food 
supply, but also for their dwellings and the ma- 
terial of which they make their nests, these 
being nearly always constructed of something 
men have gathered first — rags of old cloth, 
scraps of paper, straws, hair or wool from his 
domestic beasts, or feathers from his poultry. 
These nests are tucked away in some hidden 
nook between boards and timbers or in the crev- 
ices of stone or brick work where the mortar 
has fallen away. Old boots or bottles and boxes, 
tin cans, an unused drawer of a cabinet, hay- 
mows in the barn, bales of wool or cotton or 
hemp, anything anywhere that the mice believe 
to be out of the reach of cats and the weather 
is made to serve as a home, and a nursery for 
the baby mice, of which there are half a dozen 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

more or less, born at frequent intervals and at 
every season of the year, and quick to mature 
and have families of their own; small wonder 
that their numbers increase, despite the constant 
war waged upon them by means of cats and 
traps. When I am pitching down hay for the 
cows and sheep in the winter, I see the mice dart 
away into the labyrinths of grass stems and 
clover. The meal in the grain bins is marked 
each night with their tiny footprints, like rabbit 
tracks in the snow, and always I can hear them 
rustling deep in the straw and corn fodder, in 
their search for scattered grain and seeds. Who 
can analyze the delight the trapper feels in the 
capture of wild animals for their fur? I first 
experienced it in the capture of a mouse : as a 
very small boy I sat in the little old shoeshop 
of a winter evening watching my grandfather at 
work. In the shop, opposite the work bench, 
was a desk at which my grandfather and my 
father wrote down their ideas on spiritual and 

148 



HOUSE MOUSE . 

philosophical matters; beneath the desk was a 
litter of papers and discarded manuscript, and 
a faint rustling among these thrilled me all at 
cnce with the desire of the hunter. There was 
an old mousetrap on a corner of the bench, and 
this I baited with some of the flour paste used 
in making shoes, and set it among the papers 
under the desk. Then for long minutes I sat 
on the bench at my grandfather's elbow, the tal- 
low candle on the bench waved big shadows about 
the little room, which was full of the musty smell 
of leather and old books and papers. Then to- 
gether we heard the click of the trap, muffled by 
fur, and a new experience entered into my life, 
— an experience never to be quite repeated, but 
which awakened " the intuition and the expecta- 
tion of something which when come is not the 
same, but only like its forecast in men's dreams." 
And in later years the successful trapping of 
woodchuck, weasel, muskrat, mink, raccoon, fox, 
otter each in its turn brought only a renewal of 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

the same thrill that I felt at the capture of my 
first mouse. 

The meadow mice live in the shade of reeds and 
grasses as the wild deer live in the forest shadows. 
They have their regular paths and runways, trod- 
den smooth by the constant passing and repass- 
ing of little pattering feet. Their food supply 
is everywhere about them at all seasons of the 
year and although it is their habit to lay by small 
stores of seeds and grain in the time of the 
autumn harvest, they are not dependent upon 
these when winter covers the fields and meadows 
with snow. All winter long they are continually 
pushing out new snow tunnels in every direction, 
picking up grass seeds and weed seeds here and 
there, nibbling at roots and stems and now and 
again by chance uncovering a dormant cricket or 
beetle. When the snow is deep they work destruc- 
tion, unseen at the time, stripping the bark from 
young fruit trees and shrubs, often working ir- 




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MEADOW MOUSE 

reparable damage before the ground is bare 
again. 

They have their burrows in the earth and round 
nests of dry grass on the surface so cleverly con- 
structed as to be almost water proof. I have 
seen these in the time of spring freshets half 
under water, yet still dry within, with the little 
meadow mice, hardly bigger than bumble bees, 
huddled together there for warmth while the old 
ones are away foraging for food. The snow is 
really their safeguard, protecting them from their 
enemies as well as from the wind and weather. 
Along these dim-lighted runways they may go 
and come in safety, relaxing for a little that con- 
stant alertness which at other times and seasons 
is their only safeguard; but winter weather is 
treacherous and most uncertain; the south wind 
brings a thaw and all the lowlands are awash 
with ice water and melting snow, driving the 
meadow mice to higher grounds for safety. 
Great numbers of them must be drowned at such 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

times, for though they are good swimmers, the 
combination of melting snow and water-logged 
meadow grass submerged by the freshet must 
often prove too much for them. Those that 
reach the drier land are exposed to the danger 
of foxes, owls and weasels, winter hawks and 
cats, tame and wild. 

Every winter thaw is followed sooner or later 
by a cold wave, and the water flooding the homes 
of the meadow mice freezes hard; it is- wonder- 
ful that any of the little fellows manage to sur- 
vive those winters when thaw and cold wave fol- 
low each other month by month; as a rule only 
a very small fraction of their numbers do survive 
such a winter as the one just ended (1910-1911). 
Last summer they were very abundant; I saw 
them in haying time by the dozen fleeing before 
the devastation of the mowing, and scurrying 
away from under foot when the bunches of hay 
beneath which they had taken refuge were 

1 54 



MEADOW MOUSE 

pitched onto the cart. They are much more 
diurnal than other mice, and under the full glare 
of a midsummer sun are perfectly well able to 
look out for themselves. After the fields were 
cleared the marsh hawks came day after day 
flapping and sailing low over the stubble land, 
their long legs hanging loosely down ready to 
seize the scampering mice as they bolted away 
for shelter; night after night I heard the owls 
of one sort or another proclaiming their success 
at mouse hunting with hoot or screech or quaver- 
ing note of exultation. The varying abundance 
of owls from season to season corresponds al- 
most exactly with the varying abundance of 
meadow mice, and not for years have they been 
so numerous here as during the season just 
passed, yet in spite of all these hungry foes the 
mice increased continually in the fields and 
meadows while the warm weather lasted, and at 
harvest time worked untold harm in the corn- 
fields and gardens. Beneath almost every corn 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

shock I found their tunnels in the soft earth 
which was scattered over with chankings of ripe 
corn and shredded corn husks, where the mis- 
chievous mice had been feasting; often as many 
as half a dozen of them were to be seen scurry- 
ing away when the corn was loaded on the cart, 
and undoubtedly many more disappeared unseen 
into their tunnels beneath. 

The potato fields suffered also, and more than 
once I dug out families of frightened meadow 
mice, together with half-eaten potatoes, all roll- 
ing about together in the soft earth. Before the 
snow came I took the precaution of protecting 
my young fruit trees with wire netting wrapped 
close about the lower part of the stem. 

Last winter proved to be one of successive 
thaws and freezing north winds, with much bare 
frozen ground and ice-covered meadows. In 
spite of all their destructiveness, the unfortunate 
plight of these wild mice of the meadows at such 
times calls for our sympathy, yet when the spring 

156 



MEADOW MOUSE 

came I could only regret that conditions had not 
been worse with them, for I saw only too much 
evidence of the work of the few hardy survivors 
wherever I walked in the fields. The winter before 
last was one of deep, dry snow from December 
to March, which undoubtedly accounts in large 
part for the great increase of these little brown 
marauders, for all winter long they might follow 
their lowly paths in comparative safety, while the 
early warm spring weather which came with the 
first of March was more than usually favorable to 
the rearing of their large and numerous families. 
Meadow mice are the pluckiest of fighters, 
whether the foe be cat, owl, snake, dog or man. 
I have seen one give battle to an enraged mother 
hen backed up by her brood of clamorous chickens, 
though whether the hen desired the mouse for 
food for her family, or looked upon it as an 
enemy to be driven away from her flock, I was 
unable to determine. When fighting, the meadow 
mice stand erect to the limit of their diminutive 

157 



MOREXITTLE BEASTS 

stature, and turning about face the foe from 
every side with little teeth laid bare, like diminu- 
tive woodchucks, ever ready for the onslaught. 
Their short legs and round bodies render them 
incapable of taking long jumps like other mice, 
yet they can make good speed over the stubble 
and are quick to disappear from sight when pur- 
sued. They are probably the best swimmers of 
all our wild mice; I have seen them dive and 
swim beneath the surface and take refuge under 
the ice where there seemed to be no air space 
whatever for their breathing. Their fur is of 
a quality similar to that of the muskrat. In 
dozens of instances I have observed them swim- 
ming many rods from the dry land, often where 
the surface of the water was roughened by the 
wind. 

The white-footed wood mice are as beautiful 
as squirrels, such soft, warm, golden buff fur set 
off by fur as white as ermine underneath. They 

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WHITE-FOOTED WOOD MOUSE 

copy the squirrels also in their ways and so are 
much less at the mercy of the elements than are 
the wild mice of the meadowlands and marshes. 
They are rarely to be seen at any great distance 
from trees except when they take up their abode 
in farmhouses and barns. Their homes are often- 
est in the knot holes of old trees, either in those 
standing among others in the forest or by them- 
selves on wind-swept hillsides and river banks; 
fallen timber, half buried and crumbling, is tun- 
neled and hollowed out to make warm, dry gal- 
leries within. Among the gnarled roots of an- 
cient oaks and beeches you will find their tiny 
doorways opening into dark passages that lead 
back to the hidden chamber where the little wood 
mouse family nestles in safety with stores of nuts 
and seeds and grain packed close in crannies here 
and there about them. The homes of those that 
live in stumps and fallen logs are deep buried 
by the snow in winter, but unlike meadow mice 
and moles, these wood mice are not content to 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

be confined to narrow buried paths and tunnels, 
but push their shafts directly up from their door- 
ways to the open air. On the first morning after 
the heaviest snowstorm of the winter you will 
see the delicate tracery of their footprints lead- 
ing you away across the white floor of the forest; 
there is no suggestion of aimless wandering here 
and there, such as one gets while following the 
purposeless footprints of a rabbit; each little trail 
goes direct to some chosen point, indicating that 
the mouse that made it knew exactly where he 
was going, — first, perhaps, to a winter bleached 
garget stalk to climb for the seeds contained in 
the dried and shriveled berries, then down again 
and away on another tack to where some secret 
store of nuts is located in the hollow of a buried 
stump. These dainty-looking little white-footed 
mice are great eaters of meat whenever the op- 
portunity offers, and in spring and summer rob 
birds' nests high and low, sucking the eggs and 
killing and eating the young birds. In cold 

162 



WHITE-FOOTED WOOD MOUSE 

weather, however (owing to the fact that with 
perhaps only one exception they are the smallest 
beasts abroad), they can get their meat only by 
foraging after the larger hunters of the wood- 
land and stealing the trapper's bait. Notwith- 
standing their abundance everywhere, they are 
very seldom seen by the casual observer, for they 
are active only at night. Their big prominent 
black eyes are best suited for gathering the faint 
rays of the moonlight and dusk; only occasion- 
ally have I seen them out in daylight of their own 
accord, and then almost always in dull or rainy 
weather. Yet one of the very first bits of my ob- 
servation of wild life was, I think, of a little 
fellow of this species. I must have been about 
three years old when my grandfather called me 
across the field to peer into the crannies of an 
old stone wall where cowered the prettiest of 
little buff coated beings imaginable. Gnome or 
fairy could not have been more wonderful to 
me than that tiny morsel of living fur looking 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

out at me from the shadows of the mossy old 
stones where it dwelt. 

The wood mouse is in almost every way the 
opposite of the meadow mouse, its safety lies in 
swiftness and in the possession of senses of ex- 
treme delicacy; the ears and eyes are much larger 
than in other mice and its sensitive whiskers, 
almost half the length of its body, undoubtedly 
serve as a fourth sense that may be giving notice 
through vibrations fainter than sound of distant 
scratching claws on bark or padded footfall far 
away. Who knows but that the muffled, sound- 
less beat of an owl's wings may set in motion 
vibrations which, putting the outstanding whiskers 
of the wood mouse all a-tremble, convey a mean- 
ing through delicate root nerves to the shrewd 
little brain within, though quite unnoticed by the 
keenest ear. I have never seen the white-footed 
wood mouse offer battle even in defence of its 
young or bite the hand which takes it up. It is 
easily tamed and becomes a gentle, whimsical 

164 



WHITE-FOOTED WOOD MOUSE 

little pet, greedy for food and fairly content in 
confinement. In the fall and early winter they 
are quite fat for mice, but toward spring they 
lose flesh, while their shedding fur becomes thin 
and faded almost to mouse color, so that they are 
much less easily distinguished from other mice 
at that season. The mother mouse makes her 
nest of soft grass and feathers, often beneath a 
woodpile or crumbling stump in the pasture. I 
have often seen her when disturbed in some such 
place scurrying away, with all her family clinging 
to her and dragging alongside as she ran. Just 
before winter sets in these wood mice often move 
their abode from the woods to the shelter of 
barns and farm buildings, where they make their 
nests of straw and feathers in any hidden nook 
they can find, and join the common brown mice 
in a general feast of corn. There seems to be 
more or less bickering and quarreling between the 
two species, and from what little I have seen 
I am inclined to think that the brown mouse is 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

usually the aggressor and the victor. I wonder 
if the singing mice of which we occasionally hear 
may not be white-footed mice; for they are the 
only ones which I have ever heard whose voices 
could be called in any way musical. All their 
cries have a more or less bird-like quality, — 
faint and twittering generally, but with an occa- 
sional shrill chirp, not unlike the call of a young 
bird. 

I suspect the mice that, before an oncoming 
storm in winter are often so noisy, running and 
squeaking in the wainscoting of old buildings in 
the country, are these very white-footed mice, 
for at the times when they are at the noisiest I 
have set traps for them, and nearly always a 
large proportion of the victims were of this spe- 
cies. I wish I had made a record of the num- 
ber of wood mice I caught in the course of a few 
weeks last winter in one trap set beneath the 
eaves; I think it was nineteen, but cannot vouch 
for the exact number. 

1 66 



JUMPING MOUSE 

September iy 9 iqii. — This morning while out 
duck hunting I had an encounter with that rarely 
seen inhabitant of the wildlands — a woodland 
jumping mouse. I had just shot a brace of black 
ducks, one of which being only winged swam 
ashore and hid among the junipers on a little 
island in the stream. While tramping about 
among the low thick growth in search of the 
wounded duck, I saw right at my feet a little 
" orange tawny " mouse crouching there for con- 
cealment. Looking closely I saw at once that it 
was a jumping mouse, — such a strange kangaroo- 
like little chap, with tail and hind legs suited in 
dimensions to a much larger animal. Its orange- 
tinted fur was enough to identify it as of the wood- 
land species — to my own satisfaction at least. 
The need of making the identification positive 
hardly warranted the killing of the little fellow in 
cold blood. 

After watching him a little while, during which 
time his only movement was the motion of his 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

breathing and a continual trembling as of fear, 
I decided to put his jumping powers to the test, 
but when my hand approached him he simply 
skipped a few inches to one side and then to the 
other and then endeavored to skulk away beneath 
the branches of the ground junipers, his longest 
jump at that time being hardly more than half a 
yard. Leaving him, I once more turned my efforts 
towards finding the wounded duck, but without 
success; then wading across through reeds and 
shoal water to the shore, I continued my hunt 
down stream, and by good luck met a fellow 
sportsman who suggested taking his dog to the 
island in the hope of finding the duck by the aid 
of the dog's keener senses. 

Borrowing my friend's boat I secured the duck, 
which I had killed, and together we turned our 
course upstream. On reaching the island the dog 
entered into the chase with the enthusiasm of 
sportsman and naturalist combined, his interest 
in following the jumping mice, of which there 

1 68 




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JUMPING MOUSE 

appeared to be more than one, preventing him at 
first from following the trail of the duck. At his 
approach the jumping mice proved themselves 
worthy of their name, making sudden grasshopper- 
like bounds from under his very nose. His joy 
in this game of hide-and-seek knew no bounds 
and he put the mice to the full test of their jacta- 
torial powers, and finally covered himself with 
glory by discovering the wounded duck for which 
his master and I had been vainly seeking. 

Scientifically speaking, these jumping mice — 
or kangaroo mice, as they are often called — are 
not true mice, their coarse fur and strangely de- 
veloped hind legs classing them more nearly with 
the jerboas of Africa, or with the kangaroo rats 
of our own Southwest. 

Though found in most of the northern states 
they are nowhere abundant. The duller colored 
meadow jumping mouse seems to be the least rare 
of the two varieties, and in late summer is not 
infrequently seen in hayfields and meadows after 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

the hay has been cut. The larger and handsomer 
woodland variety is also found in the meadows 
at this season, usually along the banks of little 
streams and ponds. They seem completely to 
lack the white-footed mouse's squirrel-like gift of 
climbing. The most that I have ever seen them 
exhibit in this direction was when one little fellow 
inadvertently leaping before he looked landed him- 
self in the swift current of a woodland brook, 
&nd after swimming a few yards against the cur- 
rent, climbed upon and ran nimbly along the 
slender wet stems of floating brushwood, and then 
once more entering the water, swam to the shelter 
of the overhanging bank, thus proving himself 
capable of both swimming and climbing when the 
need demanded it, yet they frequently drown 
themselves in milk pans or pails of water into 
which their aimless leaping has precipitated 
them. 

On the whole they appear to be much less quick- 
witted than are the true mice, depending for safety 

172 



JUMPING MOUSE 

upon their faculty of taking sudden and erratic 
bounds at unexpected moments. Their food seems 
to be largely grass seeds and grain. At the end 
of summer they burrow in the earth, and curled 
up in their underground nests the whole family 
enters into a state of the most complete hiber- 
nation, which continues apparently unbroken for 
more than half the year. From my own observa- 
tion I am inclined to think that their period of 
hibernation is longer than that of any other of 
our little beasts. I have never seen them active 
earlier than May nor later than September, and 
have seen them turned out of winter quarters by 
the plough in May, at which time they were still 
completely dormant and insensible. 



173 




Chapter VI 

Raccoon — Opossum — Skunk — 
Porcupine 

/^ENERALLY speaking the coon chooses to 
dwell in thick woods, making his home high 
up in a hollow tree; yet at times a hollow log, a 
cavern among the rocks, or even a burrow dug out 
beneath the overhanging bank of a stream or 
gully is his domicile. In his nightly excursions 
he wanders indifferently over high land and low; 
through swamps and thickets and across open 

174 



RACCOON 

fields and pastures. He is a great wanderer and 
goes everywhere, towns and villages excepted. 

He robs the farmer's hen roost without fear or 
misgiving; goes into the corn field and pulls down 
the juicy ears when they are in milk. He climbs 
the tallest trees in search of the nests of birds and 
squirrels; gathers fruit of all kinds, wild grapes 
and berries and probably mushrooms, as well as 
nuts and acorns. He is fond of wading and pad- 
dling along the beds of shallow streams looking 
for shellfish and frogs. The salt meadows and 
the sea beach are favorite hunting grounds of his, 
as are the inland swamps and the shores of wood- 
land lakes and rivers. He goes abroad only at 
night and prefers to spend the daylight hours in 
sleep. In sunny weather he curls himself up in 
the thick top of a hemlock, supported and rocked 
to sleep by the elastic branches, but when the 
storm winds blow he retires to the shelter of a 
hollow tree, the higher up the better. 
- For so large an animal his ability to conceal 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

himself in exposed situations is wonderful. When 
he flattens himself along the branch of an oak 
tree it takes a keen eye to distinguish his gray 
coat from the rough gray bark. One winter when 
working in the woodlot, I set a fox trap in a 
spring where I could look at it in going to and 
from my work. The spring was surrounded by 
flat clay land, with only scattered hummocks and 
thin, short winter-killed grass, affording about 
the most meager chance for hiding to be im- 
agined. One morning I approached the spring 
to within a very few steps before noticing a big 
raccoon that had been caught in the trap. 

By merely flattening himself to the ground he 
managed to present exactly the appearance of a 
low hummock overgrown with gray moss and 
short dry grass. Anyone not knowing that the 
trap was there might very easily have passed close 
by without mistrusting that a coon was in plain 
sight and almost under his feet. 

On another occasion when I was trapping for 

176 




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RACCOON 

muskrat and mink, I was annoyed by having bait 
stolen from my traps and supposed that some sly 
old fox was outwitting me. One morning when 
going my rounds I caught a glimpse of reddish 
gray fur moving in the alder swamp where one 
of my traps was set. Thinking that I had sur- 
prised Mr. Fox in the act, I opened fire with my 
rifle. My second shot reached its mark, and 
hurrying to the spot, I discovered my victim to be 
a raccoon with one paw held fast in the trap. 

Raccoons appear to be less regular in their 
habits of hibernation than are the woodchucks 
and chipmunks. Many of them are abroad in 
November and December. After a January thaw 
you may find their tracks in wet meadowlands, 
where they evidently go mousing at such times 
when the melting snow drives the meadow-mice 
from their retreats. In February and March 
they come out from time to time, but probably 
not earlier than April do many of them make a 
practice of being abroad each night. I know of 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

no other little beast so eminently well fitted to 
look out for himself as Mr. Coon, for he ap- 
pears to command the resources of all the others 
combined. 

He eats every sort of food that Nature offers, 
animal or vegetable, and is almost equally at home 
in the forest or open country. 

The raccoon possesses all the vices of both fox 
and woodchuck, and yet he is the most likeable 
of all the wood-dwellers. 

The appellation " coon " requires no modifica- 
tion to be shared in common by the genuine 
southern darky, and the little beast of the ring- 
tail and the inquisitive nose; the characters of 
the two are — from all that I discover — prac- 
tically identical. The raccoon is just such an. 
easy-going, good-natured, jolly, amusing rascal, 
that I can never kill one without feeling almost 
as if I had committed a murder. When he robs 
your hen roost he does it in the night, and kills 
everything within his reach. Then you set a trap 

1 80 



RACCOON 

for him, and in the morning when you find him 
held fast by the paw, he shows no particular 
anger or fear or desire to escape, and, if you see 
fit to keep him in captivity for a term, quickly 
reconciles himself to his imprisonment and does 
not suffer from loss of appetite. 

He seldom ventures abroad except by night, 
and for this reason is rarely detected in his mis- 
demeanors. When the corn has just reached the 
proper stage for boiling, he comes with his entire 
family for an evening visit, and all night long 
they amuse themselves by pulling down and 
crunching the succulent ears and trampling them 
in the dust. Being classed as game, he enjoys 
the protection of the law until the 15th of Sep- 
tember, but after that you have a chance to get 
even and learn the joy of coon-hunting on moon- 
lit nights. Very few dogs are good " coon dogs," 
and a good coon dog may belong to any one of 
half a dozen different breeds. A dog that will 
persistently follow a coon track is exceedingly 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

valuable in that capacity, but is worth little for 
anything else. 

The opossums are members of that curious 
form of mammalian life — the marsupials or 
pouched animals — so called because of the 
pouch or natural pocket in which the mother 
carries her new-born young. 

This is one of Nature's many experiments 
which, though exceedingly ingenious and appar- 
ently possessed of many advantages, has not 
proved on the whole worth while, judged, that 
is, by general results. 

The marsupials as a class are decidedly behind 
in the contest for superiority, which began with 
the first appearance of active life on the earth 
and will undoubtedly continue until its term. 

They are one and all creatures of small brains 
and sluggish circulation; yet, curiously enough, 
the manner of taking care of their young more 
nearly resembles that practiced by humans the 

182 




2 

CO 
CO 

O 
Ql 
O 



OPOSSUM 

world over than is the case among most wild 
animals of greater intelligence. As it is with 
humans, so it is with the marsupials, the young 
of the highest, and this almost the lowest form 
of mammalian life, are the most immature and 
helpless when first born. 

When the baby opossums are born their mother 
takes them with her lips and one by one places 
them in her natural pocket under her belly. Once 
they have the teats in their mouths they do not 
let go; as a matter of fact in many cases the 
sides of the mouth of the baby opossum actually 
grow together, inclosing the teat, while a curious 
little channel in the tongue carries the milk which 
the mother forces into it from time to time. 

There are many things which seem to indicate 
that the marsupials were Nature's very first ex- 
periment in mammalian life. Almost every form 
of creature lower than the mammals brings forth 
its numerous young in a still more immature state; 
as eggs which are either cast adrift on the waters, 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

attached to some twig or leaf, and forgotten, or 
secreted in a nest or pouch, where they are guarded 
and kept warm for a period sufficient to give them 
a start in life. 

The common opossum is the only marsupial 
which has succeeded in surviving the cold winters 
and other hardships of a temperate climate, all 
the others being inhabitants of a tropical or semi- 
tropical region. The opossum is a most skillful 
climber, but in nothing else does he exhibit any 
skill comparable to that possessed by the other 
little beasts, the burrowers and builders, the 
swimmers and divers and hunters. He is almost 
four-handed and prehensile, like the monkey, his 
hind paws as well as his front ones being fur- 
nished with reversible outer toes like thumbs, for 
grasping, while his supple and scaly tail is almost 
another hand, with which he can hang suspended 
in order to reach any birds' nest or hanging fruit 
that might otherwise be beyond his reach. It is 
said that the little opossums, when big enough to 

1 86 



OPOSSUM 

leave their mother's pouch, frequently climb upon 
her back and, nestling in her fur with their tails 
wrapped about hers, ride about with her on her 
nightly excursions for food. 

The food of the opossum is both animal and 
vegetable in character, — fruit, berries, birds' eggs 
and young birds, — including chickens, — reptiles 
and insects. His sleeping place is a hollow tree 
or log, or a burrow dug in a hillside. In the 
autumn he fattens himself on nuts, acorns, per- 
simmons and corn, and during the winter spends 
much of his time in sleep, but does not actually 
hibernate as do the raccoon and woodchuck. 

It seems probable that the queer trick of " play- 
ing possum " practiced by this species is not really 
an intelligent feigning of death, in order to put 
an enemy off guard, and so give an opportunity 
for escape. Dr. C. C. Abbott, after careful ob- 
servation, became convinced that it was instead 
an actual condition of insensibility, caused by ter- 
ror effecting the action of the heart. This would 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

certainly seem to be an explanation more con- 
sistent with the well-known stupidity of the in- 
dividual opossum, yet at the same time we must 
not lose sight of the fact that, among the lower 
animals at least, the intelligence of the species is 
often far superior to that of the individual, and 
that a fixed habit of a species does not necessarily 
indicate that separate individuals are capable of 
reasoning out the why and the wherefore of the 
things which they may do instinctively. 

The crab-eating opossum is a more southern 
species inhabiting swamps and wet low-lands. 
Although its food consists largely of crabs and 
reptiles that it captures at the edge of the water, 
the crab-eating opossum is as expert at climbing 
and birds'-nesting as is the common opossum. 

The yapock, or water opossum, on the contrary, 
has carried this predelection for an aquatic life 
so far as completely to have lost the power of 
climbing, the species having developed webbed 
feet like those of an otter. Like the otter, the 

188 



SKUNK 

yapock is an expert swimmer and diver and dwells 
in a burrow dug in the overhanging bank of a 
stream or pond. It is of even more southern dis- 
tribution than the crab-eating species, being found 
only in South America. 

Both of these water loving opossums have 
darker colored and thicker fur than their northern 
cousin of the dry land; the yapock being curiously 
mottled and blended with gray and black. 

The skunk is about the only member of the 
weasel family that can afford to get fat. He 
belongs in the leisure class and has allowed his 
muscles to get soft through disuse. 

The typical weasels, marten, mink, ermine, 
sable, depend for their safety and livelihood upon 
the possession of lean and active bodies forever 
in hunting trim, to leap, swim, dodge and fight 
as the instant's need demands. Like the other 
inhabitants of the wild they are protectively col- 
ored, each according to its own environment. 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

The mink and otter have taken the color of 
water-soaked logs, the marten's fur blends with 
the fallen leaves and the bark of pine and spruce, 
while the ermine and weasel follow the changing 
color of the seasons in the northland, from brown 
to white as the snow comes with the coming of the 
winter, and white to brown again as it wastes 
away in the spring. A striking characteristic of 
the whole tribe is the possession of two small hid- 
den glands, that in times of anger and excitement 
give forth a musky, suffocating discharge, which 
undoubtedly serves greatly to disconcert an enemy 
in a hand-to-hand combat. The pine marten and 
sable have almost entirely dispensed with this 
most unpleasant feature, while the skunk, on the 
contrary, has developed it to a most striking 
degree. The two sacks appear to be merged into 
one which almost surrounds the base of the tail 
and is often of the bigness of a hen's egg. Its 
muscular coats are capable of exerting a pres- 
sure sufficient to eject the dreadful contents to 

190 



SKUNK 

a distance of several yards with considerable 
accuracy. 

Thus defended, Mr. Skunk is no longer obliged 
to keep in fighting trim. He can stand his ground, 
while most of his enemies are ready enough to 
give him the path. Instead of fur of neutral tint 
to render him inconspicuous, he wears a parti- 
colored coat of the loudest black-and-white pat- 
tern, and a bushy tail, white tipped, to flourish as 
a warning, lest some over-eager hunter mistake 
him for more innocent game to the detriment of 
all concerned. 

Throughout the warm weather he gets along 
well enough owing to the abundance of insects and 
reptiles and nesting birds. Though lacking the 
activity of the other hunters, he is still a good 
traveler and covers many miles of field and forest 
in a night's hunt. 

With the coming of the cold weather, conditions 
become more unfavorable for him. Insects and 
reptiles are dormant in the hard frozen earth. 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

The birds and beasts that yet remain to be hunted 
are well grown and active; only the fittest have 
survived and these have learned caution and alert- 
ness. Mr. Skunk, however, with forehanded pru- 
dence, has spent the plentiful season of late sum- 
mer and early autumn in the agreeable occupation 
of cultivating fat, prudently gathering every sort 
of food within his reach without undue exertion, 
until by far the greater part of his bulk is fat, 
which he stores under his skin, as the chipmunk 
stores nuts underground. 

When the hunting is not sufficiently remunera- 
tive to repay him for the effort required, he goes 
down into his underground nest and goes to 
sleep, tucked in with half a dozen or more of his 
fellows to economize warmth. Thus he dozes 
off week after week while the cold winds howl 
through the tree tops and the dry snow gathers 
with the increasing cold. 

With most hibernating animals there is, vary- 
ing according to the species, considerable regular- 

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3 
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SKUNK 

ity as to the time of " denning in," and in the 
duration and soundness of the winter sleep. With 
the skunks, however, such does not appear to be 
the case. While many of them go into winter 
quarters in the fall, others are abroad through- 
out the winter. 

Sometimes a den of them, dug out in the coldest 
weather, will reveal the inmates awake and active, 
while at other times they will be found completely 
dormant. I have seen a skunk come out of his 
hole on a brilliant, windy, snow-dazzling January 
noonday, and after a look around retire again 
into his burrow. I am inclined to think that after 
mid-winter the majority of them simply take pro- 
tracted naps of varying duration, interrupted by 
intervals of wakefulness. 

The skunk, like most of the smaller carnivora, 
is at the same time a most destructive and a most 
useful neighbor; on the one hand being a very 
persistent hunter of mice, grasshoppers, crickets 
and beetles, and on the other an equally persistent 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

hunter of birds' nests, and a chicken thief into 
the bargain. On the whole I am inclined to the 
opinion that his destructiveness overbalances the 
good that he does, and that his place might be 
better filled by the mouse-eating hawks and the 
smaller owls, especially the latter, if these could 
only be protected and encouraged to become more 
abundant. 

It would be a pity to have the skunks entirely 
exterminated, but of this there is little likelihood. 
The fact is that almost any species of the smaller 
wild animals if unmolested in the breeding season 
can pretty well take care of itself during the rest 
of the year if it is only capable of adapting itself 
to changing conditions. All the fur animals have 
this advantage, their fur being of value only to 
themselves, except in the cold months. 

Skunk fur is one of the most beautiful and val- 
uable of them all, the black portion, when prime, 
having that rich blue-black shade recognized by fur- 
riers as so superior to the dead-black of dyed fur. 

196 



SKUNK 

For the past twenty years the price has been 
rising pretty steadily, until of late hundreds of 
thousands of skunk skins have been marketed 
each winter, yet in spite of the persistent trap- 
ping they appeared rather to increase than de- 
crease, until about three or four years ago when 
they became, locally at least, positive nuisances. 
Since then, however, there has been a noticeable 
diminution, which may, or may not be due to the 
increased number that have been killed for their 
fur. 

Most of the fur animals prey to a certain extent 
upon other fur animals smaller or weaker than 
themselves, so that while the high price of fur is 
unquestionably a menace to their safety at one 
season, it is also in a measure a blessing in dis- 
guise to many of them at just the season when 
it is of the greatest benefit, for it is during the 
warm weather that the young animals of this class 
are in the most danger of being eaten by the larger 
and stronger ones. Muskrats, for example, while 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

perhaps the most constantly persecuted of all the 
fur anifnals in the more settled parts of the coun- 
try, are still abundant even in the vicinity of cities 
and towns, their worst enemies, the foxes and 
minks, having been thinned out by the trappers. 

The skunk, while the most conspicuously col- 
ored of all the little beasts, is yet able to make 
himself quite inconspicuous at times even in ex- 
posed situations. By moonlight and in the dusk 
you may often see them at quite a distance as they 
move leisurely about in search of mice and 
crickets. If approached, however, they generally 
become motionless, and, flattened out in the grass, 
are very hard to detect in the uncertain light. It 
is only rarely that they come out in the daytime; 
I cannot recall ever having seen more than six or 
eight all told. On November 12th, while writing 
at my desk, I looked out of the window and 
noticed a small black object moving about in the 
dry grass at the foot of the hill nearly an eighth 
of a mile away. After watching it for a few 

198 



SKUNK 

moments I was convinced that it was neither a 
black cat nor a crow, and taking my field glass 
saw at once that it was a skunk. By keeping to 
the hollows, and with the wind in my favor, I 
was able to approach to within two or three rods 
without being perceived and had a most excellent 
chance for observing his ways. 

He was busily engaged in the pursuit of grass- 
hoppers and crickets, walking cautiously along 
with a rolling, top-heavy motion, sniffing here and 
there like a dog and from time to time rising 
playfully upon his hind feet to pounce forward 
with nose and paws together on some unfortunate 
grasshopper, which he would crunch between his 
teeth with evident satisfaction. The grasshoppers 
and crickets were so numbed by the frost as sel- 
dom to hop more than a foot or two each time, 
but the skunk did not follow those that hopped 
away out of his reach, evidently depending upon 
surprising those that had failed to take alarm. 
Sometimes he dug rapidly into the turf with his 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

strong fore claws, but I think got nothing in that 
way larger than a cricket. 

He would stop at intervals to scratch himself, 
or roll over on his side in the dead grass; then he 
would stand up and shake himself and lick down 
the long fur on his flanks. 

After watching him for some time, I stood up 
and took several steps in his direction; whereupon 
he jumped back quickly, and erecting his brush, 
flourished it threateningly, all the time crowding 
himself down into a little depression in the turf, 
where, almost hidden, he let his tail fall over life- 
lessly to one side, and to my surprise the long 
black-and-white fur so mingled with the light arid 
shadow on the grass stems that one might have 
walked by within a very few steps without mis- 
trusting his presence. To all appearances he was 
really feigning death, " playing possum." As he 
lay motionless, the autumn wind ruffling his long 
fur this way and that, he looked for all the 
world as if he might have been lying there dead 

200 



SKUNK 

for a month. From observation at the time I 
came to the conclusion that skunks, like rabbits, 
squirrels, and undoubtedly most of the woodland 
folk, have more or less control over the arrange- 
ment of their fur, shading the black and white 
together, or separating them, making themselves 
inconspicuous or bringing out the characteristic 
markings of their species at will. We see this 
power much more clearly exampled among birds, 
particularly in the case of the owls, grouse, wood- 
cock, whippoorwill and the various waterfowl. 

As Mr. Skunk refused to show any sign of re- 
turning animation while I was nearby, I retired 
to* the shadow of the pine grove a dozen rods 
away, and presently saw him emerge from his 
hiding place and resume his hunting, but as he 
kept going over and over the same old act of catch- 
ing grasshoppers, I left him undisturbed in that 
pursuit. For an hour I could still see him at work, 
though in a different part of the field, just at the 
edge of the pine grove where the afternoon sun 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

shone warm and red on the pine needles and 
fallen leaves. The following afternoon I saw 
him out again in the same place; after hunting 
grasshoppers for about an hour, he retired to his 
hole in the edge of the pine grove, perhaps to den 
in for the winter; at all events I saw him no more 
after that. 

When the skunks leave their dens late in the 
winter they are quite fat, but being now compelled 
to compete with the other hunters in the chase of 
rabbits, partridges, mice and other active game, 
they lose flesh rapidly and become lean and active, 
the greater part of their hunting being now down 
in the woods and thickets. Later when the snow 
has nearly gone from the fields, though still deep 
in the woods, they come out into the open, to 
catch snakes and insects that are resuming an 
active life once more. 

The little skunks are born in April or May, in 
families of six or eight, and of all the young ani- 
mals to be seen at that season they are perhaps 

202 



PORCUPINE 

the prettiest, their short, fine fur bringing out the 
varied black-and-white markings of the species 
with beautiful distinctness. On summer evenings 
you may see them following their mother Indian 
file while she teaches them the art of hunting and 
birds' nesting. 

The porcupine, hedgehog, or quill pig, exhibits 
both in physique and character the degenerating 
effects of too easy living. 

He is not under the necessity of exerting him- 
self, either in the matter of getting a living, avoid- 
ing his enemies, laying up store of food against 
the coming of the winter, or constructing a home 
for himself. His food is everywhere about him, 
the bark of the forest trees constituting his staple 
diet the year round. This is neither very nutri- 
tious nor delicate, but appears to satisfy his taste, 
quantity, rather than quality, evidently being his 
motto. 

In the matter of avoiding his enemies, the por- 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

cupine assumes an attitude similar to that of the 
skunk. The majority of the hungry freebooters 
of the woodland preferring to go hungry rather 
than sit down to a dinner of quill pig at the cost 
of having lips and paws pierced and stabbed by 
the quills of his spiny armor, for these quills are 
easily detached from their owners' skin, and al- 
though at first contact they may cause but an 
insignificant puncture, they are so covered with 
tiny backward-pointing barbs that the involuntary 
twitching of the skin of the unfortunate sufferer 
who has come in contact with them continually 
works them deeper and deeper into the flesh, so 
that even so insignificant a weapon as a porcu- 
pine's quill may inflict the death wound of such 
mighty hunters as the grizzly, the wolf or the 
panther. For a home, the porcupine takes posses- 
sion of any chance cavern among the ledges or 
some prostrate hollow log, apparently never mak- 
ing the slightest effort towards improving the con- 
dition of things as he finds them. The natural 

204 




Q_ 

D 
O 
X 

o 

a. 



PORCUPINE 

consequence of this sort of easy-going life might 
well be imagined and predicted. 

He has a fat, clumsy body, possessed of just 
sufficient suppleness to enable its owner to climb to 
the tops of the trees the bark of which he feeds 
upon, instinct or dull reason enough to guide 
him in his search for food, to give the impulse 
which leads him to roll himself into a prickly ball 
when danger threatens, to lead him to look up a 
hidden retreat at the coming of the cold weather, 
to stir him to some slight degree of animation 
in the mating season, and, in the case of the 
female quill pig, to call forth a certain degree of 
care and protection for her young. The senses 
of sight, hearing and smell possessed by the por- 
cupine are undoubtedly much less keen than in 
those other wild creatures whose lives depend 
upon them. In spite of his protective armor, the 
porcupine is not entirely safe from attack. 
Hunger now and then drives one and another of 
the wild hunters to pounce upon and kill him in 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

defiance of the torture that must follow the allay- 
ing of their appetite. 

The fisher, the largest of the martens, has a 
way of killing the porcupine without danger to 
himself. Old trappers say that at the approach 
of the fisher the porcupine rolls himself into a ball, 
just as he does when confronted by any other 
enemy, but the wily fisher crouches near, waiting 
his chance with tireless patience, until the porcu- 
pine unrolls, exposing his unprotected throat to 
the fisher's lightening-like spring. 



208 




Chapter VII 
Moles ) Shrews and Bats 

PHERE is a class of little beasts which, al- 
though abundant enough in almost all parts 
of the world, are but slightly known to people 
generally. These are the moles and shrews. 

The true moles are round-bodied, gimlet-nosed, 
velvety-furred little chaps whose most striking 
characteristics are their big shovel-like front feet 
with which they are continually digging and tun- 
neling about underground. The shrews are of 
more mouse-like build, with longer tails, and with 
feet that are better fitted for running than for 
digging. An intermediate group, known as shrew- 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

moles or moleshrews, have the piglike bodies and 
short tails of the true moles and feet suitable both 
for digging and running. We have in the Eastern 
and Northeastern States the common shrew, which 
lives among the roots of old trees ; the larger water 
shrew that has taken to an aquatic life and de- 
veloped a tail flattened and fringed, like that of 
a muskrat, for swimming; the short-tailed mole- 
shrew who divides his time about equally between 
digging in the earth and rooting about pig fashion 
beneath fallen leaves and crumbling stumps and 
logs; the common mole, and the hairy-tailed 
mole, both possessed of true mole habits, and the 
star-nosed mole, that like the water shrew haunts 
moist and watery places, where mole-like it tun- 
nels continually in soft black mud, often under 
water. 

As a class the moles and shrews are perhaps 
the most bloodthirsty and carnivorous beasts in 
existence, even more so than the weasels. The 
common shrew is the most diminutive of all our 

210 



MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

little beasts; something less than half the size 
of an ordinary mouse. It has silky, slate-colored 
fur, varying to olive brown or silvery gray in some 
specimens. In common with the others of its 
family it is possessed of a pointed nose lengthened 
almost to a proboscis, and with this it is continu- 
ally prying into crevices and seams of the rotten 
logs and stumps, nosing about under fallen leaves 
and exploring the tunnels of every sort of grub 
or beetle in quest of prey. It is active throughout 
the winter, often running about on the surface of 
the snow in the coldest weather, though it must 
find insects scarce at such times, probably depend- 
ing upon such as it may find dormant beneath rot- 
ten bark, and it may be gathering nourishment 
from the multitudes of minute snow fleas that at 
times late in the winter blacken the melting snow. 
It also seizes upon any scrap of meat or drop of 
frozen blood scattered by some larger hunter — 
bird, or beast or man. 

In summer it undoubtedly robs the nests of the 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

smaller birds and very likely kills young mice when 
it has the chance. 

Its nest is made in a crevice of a stump or 
beneath a fallen log or wood pile. These shrews 
do not seem to be altogether nocturnal for I have 
sometimes seen them, out in the daylight, though 
it is but rarely that one has the opportunity to 
catch a glimpse of them under any circumstances. 
Most of those that I have seen were found hiding 
under wood piles or old fence boards in the 
pasture. 

To-day, August 10, 191 1, when I was sitting in 
the shadow of the pines in the pasture a short- 
tailed shrew came hurrying along over the dry red 
pine needles to within a few inches of my hand. 

I watched him for perhaps a minute as he ran 
about here and there in the broad daylight, directly 
under my eyes, a rare opportunity indeed for ob- 
serving any member of his family, for all the 
shrews are lovers of the night, secret in all their 
ways and seldom seen abroad by day. Yet here 

212 



MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

was this little fellow going about under the bright 
light of a mid-summer noon, generally in the 
shade of the pines it is true, but at times crossing 
a belt of sunshine that had found its way between 
the tree tops overhead. Often his long pointed 
snout was turned up until his face was all creases 
and wrinkles, reminding one of a little beady- 
eyed dwarf, then he would lower it to probe 
among the pine needles. Suddenly he took alarm 
and skipped across the narrow wood-path to the 
entrance of his burrow, when he disappeared, 
though for a little while I could hear him moving 
about among the fallen branches and dry twigs 
a few yards away. Fifteen minutes later I again 
noticed the peculiar musky odor common to all 
shrews, and soon saw him emerge from the open- 
ing of his tunnel. As it happened I was looking 
away just at that instant, and without thinking, 
and contrary to all the laws of Nature-study, 
turned my head slightly in order to see him more 
distinctly; as was to be expected, he instantly 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

dodged back out of sight and I saw him no more, 
though I waited for some time hoping that he 
might reappear. Undoubtedly if I had not turned 
my head he would have given me another oppor- 
tunity of observing him, and perhaps of finding 
out his reason for being abroad at mid-day. 

Possibly he was after a drink of water, the dry 
season having put many of the woodland folk on 
short rations in that direction. Seven or eight 
rods away from where I saw him there is a little 
brook, not yet quite dry, and it was towards this 
that he was going. Very likely he had been to 
the brookside and was on his way back to his nest 
when I saw him look out from his tunnel and 
dodge back at sight of me sitting in his path. 
I found his hidden runways here and there be- 
neath the fallen pine needles, and in the little 
woodland path where I first saw him, they had 
been trodden over and uncovered by the cows and 
sheep, which might account for his being out in the 
air at that particular spot. 

214 



MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

This short-tailed shrew is much the most abun- 
dant species and is often pounced upon and killed 
by the house cat, but never eaten. It is generally 
looked upon as a mole, but may be easily distin- 
guished from the true moles by its fore feet, which 
are only slightly larger than the hind ones, and 
quite unlike the clumsy scoop-shovel affairs of the 
genuine ground mole. The short-tailed shrew is 
considerably larger than a mouse, with slate-col- 
ored fur close and soft as velvet. In its habits it 
is a shrew in summer and a mole in winter, though 
even in cold weather it often ventures above 
ground to root about among dead leaves beneath 
the snow. At times it comes out on the surface 
of the snow and runs about, lured by the smell of 
raw meat, of which it is ravenously fond and 
capable of engulfing enormous amounts. 

A man possessed of such an appetite in propor- 
tion to his weight could devour several sheep or a 
good-sized heifer in the course of a day. The 
shrews that I have had in captivity could consume 

2iS 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

several times their own weight in raw meat in a 
surprisingly short time, besides drinking milk 
greedily like little hogs. When eating or drink- 
ing or fighting they turn up their taperlike pro- 
boscis, exposing two sets of crimson teeth, which 
give them a most terrifying aspect, in spite of 
their small size. To other creatures of their own 
dimensions they must be terrific foes, for they 
set about everything they do in a sort of blind 
fury, uttering all the time harsh, squeaky and 
grating cries, and emitting a rank, musky or cheesy 
smell that must be almost overpowering at close 
quarters. 

The bite of all shrews is said to be poisonous, 
but I have never seen it put to the test. 

The water shrew is much less generally abun- 
dant than the others. There is but one place 
where I have ever seen it (and there only on three 
or four occasions,) a reach of perhaps a quarter 
of a mile of a slow-flowing meadow brook, fringed 
with willows and alders and trailing smilax vines, 

216 




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I 

CO 

oc 

UJ 

H 
< 



MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

backed by pine and hemlock woods on the one 
hand and open pasture on the other. Here I have 
seen the water shrews swimming, at times on the 
surface, again under water with trails of silvery 
bubbles in their wake. On one occasion I saw 
two of them together swimming beneath the sur- 
face. They swim with astonishing swiftness and 
are seldom in sight for more than a few seconds. 
The water shrew is about the size of the short- 
tailed species, and is slate colored above and sil- 
very beneath. They probably catch and eat small 
fish and tadpoles as well as water insects, perhaps 
with an occasional diet of frogs' eggs for a 
change. 

I have never found their homes, but believe that 
they live in holes beneath the bank and among 
the roots of waterside trees. 

Of the moles, I have found the hairy tailed 
much the most abundant. A blackish, slate-col- 
ored, piglike little beast with a tail about as 
thickly covered with hair as is that of the wood- 

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chuck, and of much the same general proportion. 
The common mole is a little larger and has the 
tail almost destitute of hair. Both are genuine 
little gnomes, mining and tunneling forever under- 
ground and rarely coming to the surface even for 
a short scamper above ground. 

" Blind moles " they are frequently called, and 
not incorrectly, for their eyes are so rudimentary 
as to be little more than pigment spots beneath 
the skin, and only just sufficiently sensitive to the 
light as to serve the simple purpose of distinguish- 
ing between daylight and dark. Their other senses 
however appear to be developed in a degree to 
compensate them for the lack of seeing. 

They live in complicated underground galleries, 
in warm weather quite near the surface, and in 
winter deep down below the frost level, gauging 
the depth of their work to follow the movement 
of the earthworms upon which they principally 
feed. Forever traversing their tunnels back and 
forth, they snap up every earthworm and grub or 

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MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

beetle whose subterranean progress in search of 
bulbs or roots to feed upon has caused him to 
blunder into the trap which the mole has dug for 
him. Mr. Mole, however, does not get all his 
living in this way; whenever scent or hearing 
informs him of the working of grub or worm 
nearby, he proceeds to burrow away in that direc- 
tion, stopping at intervals to listen for the faintest 
sound or tremor that may guide him. Coming 
to the passage of an earthworm, he follows it as 
the hound follows the trail of the fox, digging 
along with remarkable quickness, boring into the 
soil with his gimletlike snout, pushing a part of 
the dirt aside as he works along, and crowding 
the remainder back into the tunnel behind him. 
Having overtaken and engulfed his humble 
quarry, he still pushes ahead with undiminished 
appetite, disinterring a chrysalis perhaps, or the 
underground nest of a spider with its dozens of 
tiny yellow eggs done up in a silken bag. 

Moles are savagely fond of raw flesh, and a 
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fight between two of them is pretty certain to ter- 
minate in a cannibal banquet for the victor. I 
suspect that when the mole in his subterranean 
travels happens upon the nest of a field mouse 
with young ones, the entire litter is devoured at a 
meal, and in the winter he must often discover 
snakes, lizards and toads, or even jumping mice, 
in a condition of defenseless hibernation, and at 
such times would scarcely hesitate to make a meal 
of whatever he could devour. Dozens of the 
common striped garter snakes are often to be 
found coiled up in an intertangled mass, and com- 
pletely inanimate, and would supply the lucky 
mole who chanced upon them in their winter 
quarters, with sufficient meat in cold storage to 
last for almost the entire winter. I have found 
snakes partly eaten under just such circumstances 
as led me to believe that moles had been dining 
upon them in their sleep. Judging from the 
length of time that is required for an entire snake 
to die after it has been dissected while wide 

224 



MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 
awake and active, one would imagine that when 
dormant the loss of one half of its length would 
hardly be likely to destroy the vitality of the 
other half. Fancy the dismay of waking from 
a long restful sleep, to discover that miscreant 
moles had been devouring a considerable por- 
tion of one's anatomy while one peacefully 
slumbered ! 

As these borings which the mole makes while 
foraging for food are more or less filled up behind 
him as he moves along, he probably does not re- 
turn the same way, finding it easier instead to con- 
tinue burrowing along searching for more victims 
as he goes, until gradually working round he 
makes connection at some point with his perma- 
nent runways. 

In an enlarged chamber, formed at the junc- 
tion of a number of intersecting galleries, he has 
his nest. In all likelihood the female has a sepa- 
rate nest chamber of her own in which she guards 
her young. Descending shafts are sunk here and 

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there as wells for the purpose of furnishing a 
water supply. 

All these small insectiverous animals are very 
dependent upon the supply of drinking water, 
unlike some of the vegetarian species, who appear 
capable of subsisting for considerable periods 
upon the sap of the plants they feed on. In the 
droughts of late summer and early autumn, large 
numbers of both moles and shrews die, evidently 
because of their inability to reach water. 

Whenever the water level sinks below a certain 
depth, so that the moles in digging their wells 
come in contact with ledge or hard-packed gravel 
that resists their efforts to go lower, they are 
forced to come to the surface and start off on long 
pilgrimages in search of lower lands. Being quite 
unsuited for this sort of travel, they make but 
slow progress, and as a consequence many perish. 

I have frequently seen them at such times, 
usually in the evening, though occasionally at mid- 
day, hurrying along at the best speed they are 

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MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

capable of making. Even the semi-aquatic, star- 
nosed mole, whose accustomed haunts are in 
swampy meadowland and along brooksides, is at 
times forced to migrate, when long weeks of rain- 
less weather have dried the black peat of his 
homelands and turned the channel of his favorite 
meadow brook into a sun-baked furrow. 

Meadow and brook alike underlaid with hard- 
packed clay, and no water to be had for the dig- 
ging, I have seen them crossing areas of high 
dry land where in times of sufficient rainfall you 
would hardly ever have seen them. An overabun- 
dance of rain affects the moles of the uplands more 
disastrously than it does the star-nosed moles of 
the wet lowlands, for the latter are such capable 
swimmers and divers that when their homes are 
flooded they assume the habits of the otter and 
mink. I have never seen them in the act of catch- 
ing insects while swimming, but should not be in 
the least surprised at witnessing such an act on 
their part, having so often observed their powers 

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of swimming both in still water and where the 
wind-ruffled surface put them to a severer test, or 
in the narrow channel of a quick-running brook. 

The common mole of the uplands, despite his 
scientific title, aquaticus, exhibits but little resource 
when his galleries are filled by heavy rains, at 
least so far as my observation goes. I have often 
found these moles after heavy thunderstorms in 
midsummer, having to all appearances been driven 
out by the flooding of their tunnels, and drowned 
on the surface before the storm had ceased. 

Wherever in wet lowlands you see numerous 
little heaps of black soil thrown up, you may know 
that the star-nosed moles have been at work. 
They seem to dwell in colonies as a rule and in- 
habit the same limited area for years. The heaps 
of earth thrown up by them are much larger 
than those of the upland moles. 

While undeniable nuisances in lawns and grass 
lands, moles as a class are of great service to the 
farmer, not only on account of the great number 

230 



MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

of insects and grubs which they destroy, but in 
the capacity of subsoilers, continually stirring and 
loosening the ground below the reach of the deep- 
est plow. 

Their tunnels also serve as drains to carry off 
an excess of surface moisture. Although at times 
they unintentionally uproot bulbs and newly set 
cuttings in their work, it is doubtful if they ever 
do any harm by actually biting into them ; if they 
ever do this it is only for the sap in times of water 
famine. Most of the damage for which moles are 
blamed is really the work of the meadow-mice. 
Huxley has shown us the immense value of the 
earthworm in agriculture, in loosening up the soil, 
and as moles feed largely upon earthworms, this 
fact might be set down as an item in their dis- 
favor; yet as there never seems to be any notice- 
able diminution of the supply of earthworms, even 
in seasons when moles are most abundant, we can 
have little to worry about on that score. The 
only wise course for us to follow is to endeavor 

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as best we may to help in keeping the balance of 
Nature on an even keel. I doubt if even from a 
selfish standpoint we should be benefited by the 
extermination of any of the forms of life about 
us, not even rats, mice, wolves, mosquitoes or 
flies, and certainly there is no form of life, either 
insect, beast or human, which could desirably be 
permitted to increase unlimitedly without check or 
hindrance. However, Nature can be trusted to 
look after this matter better than we, while man 
with all his ingenuity has never yet succeeded in 
exterminating a single form of insect life, and 
probably never will. A large proportion of the 
beasts and birds that have joined the extinct class 
within historical times were not those most per- 
sistently hunted. Just as surely as man succeeds 
by an unwise policy of overprotection in increas- 
ing the numbers of any species beyond a certain 
point, Nature steps in with disease or degenera- 
tion in one form or another and quickly restores 
the balance. 

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MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

Flitter-mouse is an old English name for the 
bat, like the German, Fleder Manser, but the bat 
is much less like the mice than it is like the moles 
and shrews. In some ways it would seem to be 
more nearly related to the monkeys. But after 
all is said the bats are still in a class by themselves, 
weird, strange, uncanny little folk, soft, gentle 
and friendly, half goblin and half fay. 

I have just been sketching a baby bat as he 
scrambled about over my desk among books and 
papers. I found him in the barn this morning, 
June 23, 191 1. I was getting down some lum- 
ber from overhead and noticed what looked like 
a bit of old leather nailed to the side of the barn, 
then saw that it was a. young bat clinging flat to 
the rough boards. I had evidently dislodged him 
from some dark nook where his mother had hid- 
den him away for his afternoon nap. The mother 
bat is unique in her manner of caring for her 
young. At times she carries them about with her, 
nursing them as she flies; then when wearied by 

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the burden of their diminutive weight, she hangs 
them up unceremoniously here and there on a 
bush or the branch of a tree, or tucks them into 
the crevice of some old building to sleep away 
the time contentedly while she is away. 

The little bats (usually two in number) appear 
to be perfectly adapted to this sort of usage, 
hanging there for hours, for all the world like 
some dilapidated old scrap of a bundle, supported 
by the tiny hooks which each of them wears at 
the bend of its wing. Old and young spend the 
hours of daylight together, often in colonies of 
thirty or forty, or even more. A favorite sleep- 
ing place of theirs is the cramped space between 
the ridgepole and the roof boards of an old barn. 
Looking up from below you can see where the 
rough old boards are worn smooth by their pass- 
ing in and out. At twilight you may hear them 
squeaking together in queer little dry, rasping 
tones as they scuttle down to peer out at the 
weather, only to withdraw again into their nar- 

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MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

row quarters if there is still too much light in the 
sky. When the darkness finally settles down, they 
come out one by one, taking wing in quick suc- 
cession out into the night. 

Artists of all ages have taken the bat for a 
model when depicting goblins, demons, imps or 
devils of every sort; imagination can go no 
farther in the direction of the weird and the in- 
congruous. The big misshapen ears above the 
impish little face with its wide gaping mouth, and 
beady little eyes twinkling beneath shaggy, woolly 
eyebrows are sufficient in themselves to inspire 
awe. 

Just how keen a bat's eyes actually are it is 
difficult to say, for iie has another sense which 
enables him to detect the nearness of any object 
which he may happen to approach in his flight, 
even when blinded, as has been amply proved by 
a number of experiments. 

The simplest explanation which appears to 
offer itself, and the one I think most generally 

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accepted is this. The vibrations of air, set in 
motion by the flapping of a bat's wing, are driven 
against each nearby object and recoil like waves 
from a rock, just as we see the ripples made by 
a boat on still water return from the bank to sur- 
round the boat again. The sensitive membrane 
of the bat's wing detects these faint vibrations, 
and veers away instinctively. When a bat hangs 
motionless, you may approach a pencil or stick 
quite close to him without any evidence on his 
part that he is conscious of its nearness. 

Our northern bats are all exceedingly useful, 
for they feed entirely upon insects, particularly 
mosquitoes and night-flying beetles. Most of 
this insect game is caught on the wing; as the 
bat flits by you in the dusk you can hear the 
gritting of his teeth as he passes through a swarm 
of midges or gnats. Occasionally he flutters down 
to the ground and hitches awkwardly along, pick- 
ing up beetles of one sort or another. Many of 
the tropical species are said to be decidedly harm- 

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MOLES, SHREWS AND BATS 

ful. The fruit-eating bats, which are as large as 
foxes and have wings that spread four or five 
feet, are perhaps the most destructive, though less 
fearful to the imagination, than are the carnivo- 
rous vampires, which, though smaller, are so hide- 
ous both in their general aspect and their habits, 
feeding as they do on flesh and blood, living and 
warm. The smaller bats and fowls, and at times 
larger animals and even men, are attacked while 
asleep and the living blood sucked from their veins. 
While the hot, wet, heavily forested regions 
of the tropics would appear to be the true home 
of the race of bats, representatives of the family 
are to be found in almost every part of the world, 
with the exception of the polar regions. Their 
powers of flight have enabled them to wander 
abroad over the surface of the earth and its 
oceans. On many a lonely island in the Pacific, 
where other forms of mammalian life are un- 
known, bats are exceedingly abundant. They 
are also found in deserts far away from the water. 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

Here in the north, bats sleep all winter long, 
large numbers of them crowded together in close 
contact, each contributing its diminutive quota of 
heat for the benefit of the general assembly. 

From October to May they maintain just suffi- 
cient vitality to keep from freezing, without any 
unnecessary waste of tissue. Even in warm 
weather they are sometimes found in a sleep so 
profound as to be almost hibernation. One spe- 
cies, the large hoary bat, which is found, though 
rarely, in the mountains of northern New England 
and New York in the summer, migrates south- 
ward and towards the sea-coast in the autumn, 
and back again to the highlands in the spring. 
This species is to be known by its large size, 
narrow, pointed wings and swift zigzag flight. 
Its fur is richly mottled and blended with light 
and dark brown. I have seen a few specimens 
flying which answered to the description of this 
species, but have never had the chance to identify 
them. 

244 




Chapter VIII 

Life 

CPRING'S breath is in the air, the dreaming 
Earth, 

Long wrapped in deep repose, 

Beneath the snows, 
Waiting the season's birth, 

Stirs in her sleep ; 

Still her warm heart doth keep 
Sweet memories of love's departed days; 

Yet does her bosom thrill 

Beneath its mantle chill, 
Owning the magic of her lover's gaze; 

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For now her lord the Sun, 
Afar his course hath run, 
And comes to wake her with his kindling rays. 

Ah! 'tis no idle word, 

In song and saga heard, 
That tells the tale of love's awakening power. 

The Northmen's myth sublime, 

The poet's tender rhyme, 
Breathe kindred truths, that fit the passing hour. 

Poet or Viking, heart of flesh or flame! 

That heart's own history 

Revealed life's Mystery; 
To Nature's child the nature secret came. 

And who shall say 

That in the heart of clay, 
Throbbing beneath our feet, no spirit dwells? 

Or that yon star, 

Pulsating from afar, 
Naught save a blind mechanic force impels? 

246 



LIFE 

O ye who deeply con great Nature's lore, 

(Yet backward read), 

Do ye not miss indeed, 
The mightiest truth in all that mighty store? 
Ye deftly read that hieroglyphic page, 

And downward trace 

The footsteps of the race, 
Until ye find the glory of our age, 

Its thought sublime, 

Lost in primeval slime. 

Ye hold the substance, but the vital flame 

Eludes your grasp; 

Spirit ye cannot clasp; 
O brave truth-seekers, can ye therefore claim 

That love and trust 

Are accidents of dust? 

Though ye may scan 

The unfolding powers of man, 
And mark the height to which his thought may 
soar, 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

How can ye tell 
What inner life may dwell 
Even in the slime that paves the ocean floor? 



" God's spirit moved above the lifeless waves, 

And life was born." 

'T is thus creation's morn 
Has shone on us across the centuries' graves. 
To-day the lamp of ancient faith burns dim; 

New lights arise, 

And flood the eastern skies, 
And echoes far great Nature's primal hymn. 

Life is, and was and shall be, ever still, 

The regnant soul; 

While suns and planets roll, 
Shall bend obedient matter to its will; 

Day after day 

Shall veil itself in clay, 
And ever thus its spiral track ascend: 

248 



LIFE 

Each shell downcast 
More perfect than the last, 
Each step more potent for the crowning end. 

'T is thus I fain would read the ancient writ 

Of ages gone, 

Graven on crumbling stone; 
At the great mother's feet, I thus would sit, 
And list the story of her morning time, 

And as I heard, 

Each retrospective word 
Should inly glow with prophecies sublime; 
Life is and was and shall be, evermore. 

Oh, deep and vast 

The records of the past, 
But measureless the promises in store. 

Sarah Elizabeth Cram. 

Instinct and reason are words which have been 
used in a distinctive sense as separating that which 
directs the movements of animals from the more 

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thoughtful intelligence of the human mind, but 
in Nature we very rarely find lines of sharply 
marked distinction, the link may be missing to 
our defective eyesight, but it is there nevertheless 
in every instance. Instinct we may safely assume 
had its birth coincident with the first awakening 
of active life, and down through all the ages has 
been one of the strongest factors in the general 
struggle. Where then did intelligence have its 
beginning? Is it the final outcome and blossom- 
ing of highly developed instinct; instinct become 
at last observant and quick to profit by what it 
sees and take advantage of every new T condition 
with which it comes in contact, or is instinct but 
the stored up experience of a dim, but ever-grow- 
ing intelligence that is older than even instinct 
itself? Among the lower animals there are 
numerous instances where instinct is unquestion- 
ably supreme and no evidence of even an incipi- 
ent reasoning power is to be detected, but to as- 
sume that with the appearance and growth of 

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LIFE 

reason the force of instinct must necessarily 
diminish is, it appears to me, scarcely logical. 
Instinct is still one of the most valuable forces 
in Nature, and, for the greatest good of any 
species, is not to be crowded out, but only con- 
trolled by reason. 

Reason or intelligence we may call one end of 
the chain, instinct the other, but the distance be- 
tween the two extremes need not imply a missing 
link between or any break in the chain as a whole. 

Instinct is an absolute necessity to any living 
creature in the general struggle for life, while 
reason is more a luxury than a necessity, and 
where instinct is sufficiently keen and life is simple 
may be dispensed with. Lacking instinct reason 
could never enable man or beast to get a living 
unaided. A man without instinct, were his reason- 
ing powers never so highly developed, would be 
classed among his fellows as little better than a 
fool should circumstances compel him to leave his 
desk and join the ranks of outdoor workers. Just 

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what instinct really is we may never know; what 
we do know is, that it is quicker than thought or 
reason and often a truer guide. In times of sud- 
den danger it acts at once, while the brain yet 
hesitates. It is not an unfailing guide either in 
man or beast, yet in the great majority of in- 
stances it may be trusted to direct us aright, even 
if now and again it does urge us to leap or strike 
or dodge at the wrong instant or in the wrong 
direction, to our own undoing. Particularly is in- 
stinct a necessity when our lives are nearest the 
lives of the wild things of the woods and waters, 
— in hunting and fishing and trapping. The game 
starts up before us and instinct brings the gun to 
the shoulder and swings the sights along its flying 
course, but awaits before pulling the trigger, often 
an appreciable part of a second, while the slower 
working brain makes sure that what it sees is the 
quarry it has been searching for, calculates the 
distance and the speed of flight, then signals the 
order to pull. 

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LIFE 

The old gunner, as a rule, is quite unconscious 
of pressing the trigger; his brain, at the exact 
instant when it perceives that the sights are in line 
with the game, merely formulates the wish that 
the gun shall be fired, and the flash and report 
follow instantly. Often the brain seems to be al- 
lowed no part whatever in the decision; the hun- 
ter feels without stopping to reason about it that 
the time has come to shoot, just as he feels with- 
out knowing why that here is the very spot to 
place a trap, or the angler is urged by his guiding 
instinct to cast his line on some particular spot, 
rather than on another that would appear to the 
eye to be a more promising reach of the stream; 
and he seldom has cause to regret it. 

Can anyone doubt this is identical with that 
which we name instinct among animals? Is it not 
the acting of long-trained members on their own 
account, the eye and the ear and the hand and the 
foot working together in unison without stopping 
to consult the brain? Let the most skillful sports- 

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man, if he is unused to snow-shoeing, start out 
through thick woods with a pair of web shoes 
bound to his feet; he will find himself from the 
very start-off under the necessity of teaching his 
legs and feet how to manage their clumsy gear, 
with no time to spare for the observation of tracks 
and signs of beast and bird, and should his eyes 
stray off through the snow-flecked undergrowth 
in search of his quarry he will in all probability 
quickly find himself capsized, with his gun stick- 
ing muzzle down in the snow. If his ancestors 
before him have tramped the woods on snow- 
shoes he will profit by their experience and learn 
the quicker for it, but at the best, many a day of 
tiresome discipline will be required before his 
feet shall have learned to lift the broad frames 
aright to sift off the loose snow, to avoid the 
trailing heel of its fellow snow-shoe, and to relieve 
itself without a sound from encumbering twigs 
and fallen branches and half-buried stumps and 
logs, leaving the eye free to search ahead and on 

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LIFE 

all sides for the faintest sign of the trail winding 
away dimly between the trees. Here reason and 
instinct work together on something like equal 
terms to accomplish the same end. 

Instinct may however be trusted at times to work 
alone, while the brain is " absent-mindedly" con- 
cerned with other matters, or worrying over dis- 
tant affairs that have no connection whatever, it 
may be, with the woods and the wild things there. 
The feet take charge of the snow-shoes, and the 
hand and the eye of the gun, and the latter may 
even take aim and fire with all the necessary pre- 
cision before the brain has had time to get back 
to nearby things. 

Who can doubt that this instinct in man is the 
same as the instinct which guides the wild animals 
in the woods? The fox may not know how he 
follows the trail of the hare, but he knows why 
he follows it; it is not altogether instinct and 
hunger that lead him on. I believe that his foxy 
brain holds clearly enough the image of the game 

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he is after; his ears are alert for the faintest 
pit-a-pat or rustle of furry foot among the leaves 
and moss; faint vibrations of the air no human 
ear could perceive tickle his delicate hearing with 
a meaning clear as a spoken word to him, and 
his simple woodsy mind distinguishes at once the 
light tread of a rabbit or a mouse from the sound 
of a wind-rustled leaf, by powers long handed 
down through generations of hunting fore-bears, 
and sharpened and developed and held true 
through his own experience day by day. How 
can we divide instinct from reason here? 

I for one can never believe that blind, unseeing 
instinct teaches the fox all that he knows. The 
fox cub of the season, first beginning to hunt for 
himself, and the young crow that has just learned 
to fly, are unsuspecting fellows, easily outwitted, 
though quick to learn and undoubtedly profiting 
by the example of their parents which they follow 
imitatively; but there are numberless things which 
each must learn for himself and times when 

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LIFE 

neither instinct nor reflex action can possibly meet 
all the requirements of the case. It is a perfectly 
well-established and undisputed fact, that in wild, 
thinly settled country, foxes are much more easily 
outwitted than where men are more abundant. 
Much more to the point as evidence that their in- 
stinct is in part at least assisted by natural intelli- 
gence, is the equally well-established fact (which 
I have myself repeatedly observed and heard 
commented upon by trappers and local observers) , 
that while a new method of setting traps or wire 
snares, a new combination of scents, some old 
combination of scents, or a secret of trapping that 
has not been practiced in a certain region for half 
a generation perhaps, and is revealed as a dying 
bequest of some old trapper to his grandson, am- 
bitious to follow in his footsteps, may prove sur- 
prisingly successful for a season or two, it can 
never be profitably followed for any length of 
time in that particular vicinity. And when it has 
once become useless any method of trapping or 

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snaring or poisoning foxes is sure to continue un- 
successful for a considerable number of years. 
From what I have observed I should not hesitate 
to say that at least the full length of a fox's life, 
— twelve or fourteen years, — must elapse before 
more than an occasional fox can be outwitted in 
that particular manner. Now how could instinct 
possibly bring this about? It is too absurd to sup- 
pose that after one or at most two winters during 
which possibly one fourth of the foxes in a cer- 
tain district have met their fate in a particular 
kind of trap, and one out of twenty has been 
pinched and has got away again, all the fox cubs 
of that region born in the next ten years should 
be from the first inspired by an inborn fear which 
holds them back from that particular danger. 
Here is an instance in point which I can relate 
from personal observation. There is a shallow 
muddy spring some two rods long by six or eight 
feet wide in the flat clay land of my home pas- 
ture. In Country Life in America for April, 

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LIFE 

1902, I read how foxes might be sometimes 
trapped in just such places. I set a trap at that 
spring about one foot from the bank, sinking trap 
and chain in the soft black mud, which immedi- 
ately closed smoothly over everything, with a half 
inch of water over the mud. Just over the pan 
of the trap I gently placed a little island of green 
moss such as may be seen here and there dotting 
the black, boggy places; beyond the trap I stuck 
up a weather-beaten, water-soaked stick with the 
bait on that, as if the trap were set beneath it for 
mink. Now foxes are very fond of stealing the 
bait from mink traps set in narrow spring brooks; 
time after time you will find their tracks leading 
directly to that point of the brook's bank nearest 
the trap, the footprints showing clearly where the 
sly thief stood with feet close together, stretching 
himself out above the water to reach the bait. 
Sometimes if a little tussock or stone protrudes 
from the water in a convenient place the snow 
lodged there will show the print of his fore foot. 

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He knows well enough that if a steel trap were . 
hidden in the snow and moss above-water the smell 
of iron would betray its position to him rods 
away; and so long as he keeps his feet dry he 
feels safe. For a few days the foxes passed by 
my trap at the spring without going very near. 
They wanted the bait and turned aside from their 
course to investigate, but were cautious about ap- 
proaching too close at first. Then one morning 
I found a she-fox fast in the trap. Not long after 
an old dog-fox put his foot in it, but managed to 
break away; since then, though I have set traps 
there every winter, not one fox of the scores that 
have passed that way has been fooled by that 
harmless looking little island of green moss. The 
knowledge that the trap is there does not frighten 
them away. At times in very cold weather they 
will come night after night, until the thin ice 
pushing out from the bank on the side farthest 
from the trap is strong enough to hold them and 
enable them to get the bait from that direction. 

262 



LIFE 

I have caught at that spring in the meantime, 
a coon, one or two skunks and several crows, but 
never another fox; nor have traps set in a similar 
manner in nearby springs ever proved successful. 
Now I am quite positive that no one else has ever 
attempted to catch foxes in this way hereabouts. 
No other little green islands of moss in muddy 
springs have ever proved dangerous to them in 
this immediate vicinity. How then did all the 
foxes of this region learn their danger so quickly, 
without some common method of communicating 
facts one to another? As I have stated before, 
it is not the spring itself or the grass-grown banks 
of mud which they have learned to avoid. I still 
see their tracks there just as before and they still 
manage to carry off the bait from time to time. 
Call it language, telepathy, what you will; in 
some way, through some form of animal com- 
munication, the intelligence has spread among 
them all that a perfectly harmless-looking little 
island of green moss is not to be trusted. The 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

rapidity with which knowledge of this sort spreads 
among wild animals varies greatly with the spe- 
cies. Among skunks, woodchucks and minks it 
appears to be only the individual who suffers that 
profits by it. 

Skunks, for example, are commonly most un- 
suspecting, and easily taken in any kind of trap, — 
box trap or dead-fall, or a steel trap set on a stump 
without the slightest attempt at concealment. 
One of the most conspicuous characteristics of the 
skunk is his lack of fear, and after having been 
pinched pretty severely he seldom shows much 
fear of the trap that hurt him; yet in most in- 
stances it is extremely difficult to catch him again 
in that particular kind of trap. Try to catch a 
three-legged skunk in a steel trap; he will spring 
it night after night and get the bait without en- 
dangering his remaining legs. Sometimes he will 
turn it bottom up and you will repeatedly find it 
sprung in that position, the steel jaws gripping the 
dry grass and pine needles beneath it; then again 

264 



LIFE 

he will push his nose or a paw under the flat 
spread jaws, often burrowing down into the soft 
earth or snow in which the trap is concealed. 
Among foxes in settled regions these tricks are 
so common that they might very reasonably be 
attributed to instinct or the inherited experience 
of the species; but where one skunk out of a 
dozen will repeatedly manage to spring a trap 
and get the bait, in one way or another on suc- 
cessive nights, the others dwelling in the same 
burrow seldom appear to learn from him. Skunks 
winter in burrows in the woods, often six or eight 
together, and during the latter part of the winter 
are in the way of coming out in search of food 
every night when the weather is not too severe. 
After your steel trap has been sprung until you 
are tired of resetting it, fix a dead-fall or a com- 
mon box trap near the burrow and the chances are 
that one of the first victims will be minus a leg, 
and it is quite as likely to be a young one of the 
previous summer as one of the old ones. After 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

he is out of the way the others may be taken one 
after another in steel traps set without any at- 
tempt at concealment. A skunk that has once 
been hurt in a dead-fall will often learn to get the 
bait by digging into the pen from behind, or if 
the ground is frozen too hard for that he will 
crawl up the top log and enter the enclosure from 
above. In either case he may generally be caught 
without much difficulty in a steel trap set inside 
the dead-fall, but he is pretty certain never a 
second time to attempt to crawl in beneath the 
log that has once fallen on him, though if the dead- 
fall is allowed to remain sprung with the top 
log resting on the bottom one he is very likely to 
enter the trap by crawling over both logs in search 
of the bait. 

Now if Lloyd Morgan's verdict, that animals 
do " not perceive the why and think the there- 
fore " is conclusive, how could it be possible that 
a skunk should do these things? How could he 
be led by instinct or reflex action to overturn the 

266 



LIFE 

steel trap or laboriously force an entrance into the 
enclosure of the dead-fall from behind, or above, 
rather than go into the opening beneath the top 
log? If it were merely a matter of reflex action, 
the fear arising from his suffering when caught 
in the trap being overridden by his compelling 
hunger, we should naturally expect that in his sec- 
ond attempt to get the bait he would simply ap- 
proach the steel trap from the other side, just as 
the skunk that was hurt in the dead-fall will en- 
deavor to dig in from behind. I fail to see how 
the most vivid imagination can logically explain 
these actions as due wholly to instinct. It was 
instinct which led the skunks in the first place to 
follow up the scent of the bait until the trap 
gripped them, instinct that drove them to bite 
the cruel iron jaws, and failing to free themselves 
in that manner, it was undoubtedly instinct rather 
than reason that made them bite and gnaw the 
numbed foot held fast in the trap until they got 
away. Instinct might even lead the skunk or 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

woodchuck to dig down the loose earth from the 
side of his burrow in order to bury the trap that 
has been placed in his doorway (a thing which 
both of these animals will often do), Dut instinct 
could never teach the fox or skunk to overturn 
the steel trap or dig into the rear of the dead-fall 
or to recognize the fact that a trap is harmless 
when sprung; nothing short of reasoning the mat- 
ter out according to their own " dim-eyed under- 
standing " could teach them these things. Now 
all this I can vouch for as common, every-day 
facts in the experience of the trapper. I have 
always been especially interested in the smaller 
wild animals of the hunting tribe, the " fur ani- 
mals." I have hunted and trapped them and fol- 
lowed and studied their trails in the snow. I have 
associated with local trappers and gathered what 
information I could from them. I know and can 
state positively from my own experience, proved 
over and over by an hundred tests, that a steel 
trap set beneath the dead leaves and then snowed 

268 



LIFE 

under will be avoided by ninety-nine out of every 
one hundred foxes that pass that way, unless the 
smell of the iron is disguised by some more power- 
ful scent. Yet the same trap when sprung, with 
a squirrel or a rabbit or a muskrat held fast in 
its jaws, will be fearlessly approached and the 
game pulled from its grip by at least one fox out 
of every ten. Most foxes (it is impossible of 
course to say just what proportion of them, per- 
haps one-half, possibly nine-tenths) are too cau- 
tious to risk meddling with a steel trap even when 
it is sprung, but this very fact, it seems to me, 
only goes to prove the more conclusively, that 
their actions are guided by instinct and intelli- 
gence working together, impulsive animal instinct 
guided and controlled, in part at least, by a slowly 
awakening intelligence which day by day is learn- 
ing to observe and dimly understand. 

Now all these things I have not myself seen 
in the act, but I have read most of them in Na- 
ture's own handwriting in the snow, which is really 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

much more convincing than being an eye witness 
under the ordinary conditions of woodland obser- 
vation, when, peering through tangled underwood 
in the uncertain light and dappling shadows, you 
see, but are very seldom quite certain of what you 
see, the time being usually so short and the cam- 
era of service only under the most favorable 
circumstances. But the tracks in the snow are 
there before your eyes, clear as print and as easily 
read, and there they will remain, to be revisited 
if you like and deciphered at your leisure, until 
the next snowfall or a thaw blots them out. There 
are times, however, when to see the thing in the 
doing has a convincing power greater, to the ob- 
server at least, than any conclusion arrived at by 
the logical balancing of evidence against evidence; 
when the turn of a neck, the gleam of a woodland 
eye looking for an instant's glance straight into 
your own, leaves you with a sense of " know 
ing without knowing how you know " that behind 
the glance that met yours was a thought, and that 

270 



LIFE 

your image reflected in the eye of the wild thing 
that looked at you would remain as a memory to 
be puzzled over. 

You may, if you like, class a conclusion thus 
arrived at as in itself a product of instinct rather 
than reason, but instinct in man as well as in 
beast is often a good guide in the search for the 
truth, and may at times point out to the thinker 
which line of an abstruse problem will lead him 
to the final truth of the matter, just as the instinct 
of the fox tells him which line of the confused 
trail will lead him true to his quarry. 

My neighbor, the accuracy of whose observa- 
tions I can vouch for, was eye witness recently of 
a little incident in fox life which convinced him, 
and which would I think go far towards convinc- 
ing anyone, that foxes are capable of both obser- 
vation and forethought. He tells me that early 
one morning a few weeks since he heard his 
pullets in the orchard clucking nervously together, 
but without any general outcry of alarm. On 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

going to investigate he found the flock staring 
with outstretched necks at a fox that had sepa- 
rated one of their number from the rest and was 
driving it cautiously away from the house without 
making any attempt at seizing it. 

Mr. Burroughs, in the Outlook for December 
14, 1907, says, " When the animals are confronted 
by conditions made by man, then man could give 
them valuable hints. " Undoubtedly this old fox 
was in a manner profiting by the hint dropped him 
on some previous occasion by an irate farmer, 
who at the clamorous outcry of his terrified flock 
rushed out, gun in hand, and let fly the stinging- 
shot in his reckless anger. His object we may 
be certain was not to teach the fox caution, but 
the result was the same in the end. It taught the 
fox what neither instinct nor reflex action could 
have taught him, and much more quickly than the 
process of evolution or the slow working of nat- 
ural selection. Both instinct and reflex action were 
undoubtedly active at the time in urging the 

272 



LIFE 

farmer on and in speeding the terror-stricken fox 
in his break-neck dash across the pasture, but 
only on the theory of intelligent reasoning and 
the putting of two and two together, can we satis- 
factorily explain the manner in which the fox was 
ultimately led to control his natural instinct, which 
would lead him to pounce on the nearest pullet 
and make off with it at once. An intelligence not 
so very different from that of the human animal 
must have been working in his foxy mind, en- 
abling him to " Perceive the why and think the 
therefore, " underlying the actions of man, beast 
and bird alike. 




273 




timmm 



Chapter IX 

The Home Pasture 
An Old Orchard 

By many tempests bent and torn, 
The aged apple trees still stand. 

Their twisted branches stained and worn 
Beside the crumbling stones and sand. 



A little pile with vines o'ergrown 

And fringed about with " Bouncing Bets " 

Which tell this once as " home " was known 
The humble blossom ne'er forgets ! 
274 



THE HOME PASTURE 

'T is holy ground, long since made blest 
By birth and death and love and loss, 

A place to muse awhile and rest, 
And cast aside life's gathered dross. 

E. L. C. 

1X/TY first observations of wild animal life were 
made in " the home pasture. " There, as a 
boy, I spent much of my time watching the ways 
of squirrels, woodchucks and birds. A list of the 
little wild beasts that I have seen there would 
include about all that are to be found in this part 
of New England, though the pasture itself con- 
tains but about thirty acres of highland and low. 
For the past two or three centuries it has provided 
summer feed for sheep and cattle, and incidentally 
both summer and winter provender for roving 
undomestic beasts. 

Two little spring brooks just wide enough for 
a muskrat to swim in comfortably, enter the pas- 
ture from the south, and each flowing under its 

275 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

stone bridge, they come together and find a devious 
way across the flat clay land to join " Old River.'' 
There are no less than ten springs that feed these 
two little brooks, yet the combined waters of them 
all are easily accommodated, except in time of 
freshet, in the narrow channel of the main brook, 
hardly a foot wide or deep. 

The inhabitants of these brooks are little blunt- 
nosed brook-pickerel, newts and green-backed, 
goggle-eyed frogs with their families of uncared 
for wriggling tadpoles, and yellow spotted tur- 
tles, with now and then a painted turtle or a 
rough-backed old snapper that has found the way 
up the narrow channel from Old River. 

There are also many small eels in these brooks, 
and it is odd to think that every one of these little 
eels was born in the ocean, and has found its way 
unguided, except by instinct, through ten miles or 
more of winding tide-water creeks, rippling shal- 
lows and quiet mill ponds to the head waters of 
the little pasture brook. 

276 



THE HOxME PASTURE 

Beyond the brooks the land rises in a pine- 
covered slope where dry red pine needles carpet 
the ground beneath the old rough-barked bull 
pines, and beyond that the bare, sheep-trimmed 
hill top, hemmed in by clustering growths of young 
white pines. Practically all the young trees in 
the pasture are white pines, for the ever-nibbling 
sheep nip off every shoot of oak or maple or elm 
within their reach; only here or there a lucky 
sapling protected in its infancy by fallen brush- 
wood, has managed to lift its topmost shoot be- 
yond their reach, and then is safe to stand alone 
and grow up into the sunlight as Heaven wills it 
should. There are half a dozen of these little 
saplings that have sprung up within the last few 
years, — birch, maple and elm, already higher 
than a man's head and bidding fair to make fine 
trees in their own good time, and join the ranks of 
the old-growth hardwood trees, of which nearly 
a score now stand in groups or singly with massive 
columns and wide-spreading tops unlimited for 

279 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

sky room. White oak and red oak, red maple and 
rock maple, elm, ash, hickory, linden and beech 
are here. The cavities in these old trees furnish 
homes for many of the native inhabitants of the 
pasture. Every one of them shelters a family of 
squirrels, red or gray, or else a colony of wood- 
mice. In the hollow branch of a rock maple rac- 
coons find lodging. At night they bestir them- 
selves, awake, come down to earth, and follow the 
well-trodden sheep path down to the stone bridge 
and then along the wet margin of the brook, frog 
hunting. The biggest maple of all is a splendid 
symmetrical tower still, though long past its prime. 
At the base of the great trunk is a cavity in which 
I have spent many a rainy hour, and here I fre- 
quently leave axes and wedges or hang up the 
long cross-cut saw in the dry interior as one would 
in a tool house and almost as safe from the 
weather. There are perhaps a dozen woodchuck 
holes here and there about the pasture, some be- 
neath the gnarled and twisted roots of these old 

280 



THE HOME PASTURE 

hardwood trees, others on sunny knolls among 
the pines. All of these holes are domiciles of 
long standing; I think that there has not been 
a new woodchuck hole dug in this pasture for a 
dozen years at least. A few of these holes have 
continued to be the homes of woodchucks exclu- 
sively for an indefinite number of years, but most 
of them change owners from season to season, 
the best holes being seldom unoccupied for many 
weeks at a time. When one woodchuck is killed 
or sees fit to change his abode, a skunk, or a whole 
family of them is pretty certain to move in within 
a few weeks; then when the supply of nearby 
mice and insects begins to run short and the skunks 
wander away in company in search of more favor- 
able hunting grounds, a gray rabbit may move in 
for a while, until evicted by some wandering 
weasel or mink, who very likely makes it his abid- 
ing place temporarily. Nearly every summer a 
pair of foxes make their summer home in their 
den on the sandy hillside and raise a family of 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

lusty cubs; on sunny afternoons I often see them 
racing and playing together until, tired out, they 
stretch themselves at length on the dry moss to 
sleep in the sun. 

In the low ground, meadow-mice, moles and 
shrews have their homes and runways, and at 
times a lone muskrat has his dwelling in the brook 
beneath the bridge or in the little swampy growth 
of alders where the two brooks come together. 
Something less than a century ago, before my 
grandfather cleared it and let in the sunlight, all 
this low ground was a wet and tangled alder 
swamp; then from the black swamp-mud over- 
lying the stiff clay pan, there sprung up wild 
meadow grasses, blue flowering flags, thistles and 
white clover. Here cows and sheep now browse 
and nibble through long summer days, while swal- 
lows skim low over the sunlit grasses where once 
only woodcock and other shade-loving birds lurked 
in the sunless tangles of the alder swamp. Each 
summer I clear out the channels of the little brooks 

282 



THE HOME PASTURE 

to give their waters a free course to find their 
proper level, but still the old spirit of the swamp 
fights hard year after year to regain possession 
of its lost domain. Along the brook's margin 
the alders spring up in clumps and extend their 
root fibers across the stream to catch and hold 
fast every floating leaf or twig or bull-rush stem, 
quickly forming an obstruction that holds back 
the water, causing it to overflow the low banks. 
Already the swamp has gained possession of an 
area of several rods where the alders now grow 
thick and tall and the dry land is but a collection 
of little hillocks, around which the waters divide 
and subdivide and join again with no perceptible 
channel or current anywhere. 

Each of these little brooks has its own particu- 
lar character and personality. The main brook 
drains a little swamp on my neighbor's land, and 
its waters are tinged by the decaying leaves and 
vegetation. Having traveled farther from its 
underground source than have the others, it is 

283 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

more quickly affected by the changing seasons. 
In summer it is comparatively warm, and in winter 
is early frozen over and buried from sight beneath 
drifting snows, but I can still hear it murmuring 
contentedly to itself on its hidden way to join Old 
River. Draining as it does a wider area, it is 
more subject to overflow in times of rain and 
thaw than are the others. 

Next in size is the brook that flows from a deep 
spring just beyond the southern boundary line of 
the pasture. A clear, cold, rippling brook running 
over a bed of clay and gravel, it still flows on un- 
frozen throughout the winter, for at its source 
the water comes bubbling up from deep under- 
ground far below the reach of frost, and in its 
quick course to join the larger stream, the coldest 
winds of winter do not have a chance to chill it 
to the freezing point. 

At times the deep snows bury it from sight for 
a few hours, but after the storm has cleared away 
the little brook quickly melts the snow above it 

284 



THE HOME PASTURE 

and goes sparkling along between high white 
banks in the thin winter sunshine. The north 
wind sifting the dry snow across the pasture 
fashions drifts and snow wreaths along the banks, 
but every particle of snow that comes in contact 
with the running water is quickly dissolved and 
becomes a part of the brook itself. 

All winter long the caddis worms and water 
beetles crawl along the bottom and busy them- 
selves about their own affairs as if there were no 
such thing as winter in their lives. 

In the black peaty soil out in the middle of the 
pasture there are a number of little springs that 
come welling up through circular openings in the 
deep clay beneath; for them there is no chance 
for a downward flow, as all about them the black 
soil lies flat and level as a floor. Left to them- 
selves they would of necessity form stagnant 
ponds and bog holes fringed about and over- 
grown with water grass and rushes. With a view 
to preventing this, I dig for them narrow channels 

285 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

and water ways to the nearest of the free-flowing 
brooks, but even with a way thus laid open for 
them, the sluggish water, heavy with the black 
sediment of the old swamp, lacks sufficient head- 
way to keep clear a channel for itself; either the 
crumbling banks fall in, or wire grass and reeds 
spring and take root to catch and hold back the 
sediment and drift as the lazy water tries to crawl 
between the stems. So from season to season 
I find it easier to dig for them new channels, than 
to endeavor to keep the original ones clear, for 
the roots of the wire grass form a matted bed 
which only the sharpest spade can cut through, 
and quickly renew themselves and grow again 
wherever they have once become established, but 
by turning the water into another channel, the old 
bed dries out and the wire grass gives place to the 
common wild grasses of the low pasture land. 

All across the low land and up the slope of the 
hill the hard-hack springs up anew each season, 
and though the sheep browse and nibble at it con- 

286 



THE HOME PASTURE 

tinually they fail to keep it in check. Undoubtedly 
a sufficiently large flock would succeed in keeping 
it under control, but in that case I am inclined to 
think there would be little feed of any sort left 
for the cattle. When it first springs up, the ten- 
der leaves and buds of the hard-hack furnish good 
feed for the sheep and it is hardly to be regarded 
as a nuisance for the first season or two of its 
growth, but the slender stems when they die 
become dry and seasoned into a wood as hard 
and solid as oak or hickory and about as durable. 
The next season's growth starting up from the 
roots, becomes dry and seasoned in its turn, help- 
ing to form a clump of wiry stems between which 
the sheep are unable to thrust their noses, eager 
to nip off the tender new growth, which thus pro- 
tected for the season is able to push up into the 
sunlight, nodding its conical tufts of purple blos- 
soms in the wind, and later scattering its ripened 
seeds over the snow. The seeds that are not gath- 
ered and eaten by the snow birds and winter 

287 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

finches during the cold weather, sink into the snow 
and are buried from sight until a thaw comes 
and the freed water carries them here and there, 
until at last they find lodgment among the grass 
roots, where with the coming of the spring they 
will sprout and make the beginning of new 
clumps of hard-hack, which in time spread and 
thicken and scatter seeds in their turn, until the 
whole pasture is overgrown and ten acres shall 
not furnish grass enough for one cow for the 
summer. In August before the seeds have rip- 
ened, I take my bush scythe and spend long days 
in the pasture mowing down the stubborn clusters 
of wiry hard-hack stems. When they have become 
fairly established and make a thick growth occu- 
pying the land, it is necessary to rake them to- 
gether and burn them, after they are cut; for if 
left on the ground they form a protection for the 
new growth which starts up from the roots. But 
once the ground has been well cleared it is easy 
to mow off the new shoots of the following season 

288 



THE HOME PASTURE 

with an ordinary grass scythe, and if this is 
followed up for a season or two you will have 
your cleared area under control so that only 
here and there a lucky shoot escapes the nibbling 
sheep. 

There is a tradition that a small flock of sheep 
feeding with the cows will clear a pasture of 
bushes of all kinds, but hard-hack is not the only 
exception; ground laurel, bay, sweet fern and 
ground juniper alike defy them. The only crea- 
tures, as far as I know, that will kill the ground 
juniper, are the stub-nosed, short-tailed meadow- 
mice, and then only when their numbers have so 
increased that along with the few junipers which 
they kill by girdling under the snow in hard win- 
ters, a still larger proportion of young fruit trees 
and hardwood saplings are destroyed in a similar 
manner. 

The bay sends up at first scattered clusters of 
harmless-looking gray and twisted stems through 
the thin turf, each stem surmounted by its cluster 

289 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

of fragrant leaves. It is persistent and aggressive 
like the hard-hack, but instead of scattering its 
seeds on the snow, to be spread abroad and in- 
crease its range in that manner, it contents itself 
with dropping each seed down among the roots 
of the stalk which bore it, where it will have the 
protection of the parent cluster. In this way the 
clump of bay-berry bushes thickens and spreads 
out in a circular form year after year, keeping all 
the space between the stems so thickly carpeted 
with the stiff shining brown leaves of the season 
before that seeds of taller-growing plants falling 
by chance among them have slight prospect of 
taking root and growing up to overshadow them. 
Grass or other provender for the cattle has no 
more chance of growing in a clump of bay than it 
has beneath the pines. For scattering a certain 
proportion of its seeds abroad, the bay appears 
to depend upon the agency of the birds, the myrtle 
warbler in the late autumn months stuffing itself 
with the wax-coated seeds. The thin covering of 

290 



THE HOME PASTURE 

wax on these bay-berries probably contains suffi- 
cient fattening properties to tempt the birds to 
swallow the seeds entire, as one may often see 
whole flocks of them doing at the season when all 
animate Nature is engaged in one way or another 
in storing up carbon for warmth against the com- 
ing winter, whether it is to be passed north or 
south. The germ of the seed itself is encased 
within an inner coating, so hard and indigestible 
that it is undoubtedly often carried safely in the 
bird's gizzard over miles of forest and open in 
the course of the migration. Often associated 
with the bay, the sweet fern grows thick in little 
openings among the pines, and when the hot sun 
pours down at noon day, the combined fragrance 
of sweet fern, bay and pine renders the air deli- 
cious almost to the point of intoxication. The 
sweet fern (which is not a fern at all, but a shrub 
in the same class as the bay) bears its seeds in the 
form of small nuts like diminutive chestnuts em- 
bedded in a soft burr; just what scheme Nature 

291 



MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

has worked out for the distribution of these seeds 
I do not know, for to tell the truth I have never 
detected bird or beast in the act of eating them 
or carrying them off. I have eaten them myself 
and found them not unpalatable, and beyond ques- 
tion there is some little wanderer of the wood- 
lands who knows them well and values them 
enough to gather them for his winter store, and 
in so doing scatters here and there a seed, where 
chance favoring, it will sprout and take root; 
for in some way or another the sweet fern is 
spread thinly at intervals in widely separated 
patches, though its seeds have neither wings 
wherewith to fly, like the seeds of maple and pine 
and birch, nor hooks to catch in the fur of ani- 
mals, though it is possible that the burr itself 
when dry may sometimes steal a ride in this man- 
ner. Unlike the hard-hack and bay-berry, the 
sweet fern is a friend rather than an enemy to the 
pasture. Years ago, a drover looking over our 
flock, called my attention to the fact that where the 

292 



THE HOME PASTURE 

sweet fern grows you will find the most luxuriant 
pasturage. 

The ground laurel, sheep laurel or sheep kill 
grows like the bay in clustering patches and along 
the fringe of the pine groves. Like a little brother 
of the mountain laurel, scarcely higher than one's 
knees, its clustering blossoms are more beautifully 
and richly tinted than are those of either the moun- 
tain or the swamp laurel, but despite its beauty, it 
is a most unwelcome tenant of the pasture, for 
in early spring before other forage is fairly 
started, the shining evergreen leaves of the sheep 
laurel often tempt the hungry flock turned out to 
early pasture, and those lambs whose instinct has 
failed to warn them against the danger are often 
poisoned by eating the leaves. Old sheep rarely 
touch it, and it would be interesting to know if 
young lambs from a flock that has always fed in 
pastures where the laurel does not grow are in 
greater danger when exposed to the temptation, 
than are the lambs of sheep that through bitter 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

experience have learned to avoid it. Only a small 
proportion of those that are poisoned by it actu- 
ally die from its effects. I suspect that the seeds 
of this laurel (like those of certain other poison- 
ous plants) sometimes manage to protect them- 
selves from being digested after being carried to 
a distance, by poisoning the birds that have been 
tempted to eat them. Yet in winter the ruffed 
grouse stuffs its crop to the bigness of an orange 
with the leaves of the laurel and does not appear 
to suffer any ill effects. 

The round blue berries of the ground juniper 
and red cedar are coated with a sweetish gum to 
tempt the birds. Wherever they may chance to 
fall, in the low lands or on the hill top, there 
springs up a little prickly evergreen perfectly 
capable of defending itself in the most unpro- 
tected situation. The tough crooked stem of the 
ground juniper sends out thick, low-spreading 
branches in all directions, the dense bronze-green 
foliage overshadowing and killing out all the 

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grass beneath. In time a single juniper will over- 
spread several rods of ground in its slow, relent- 
less growth. Yet the juniper in its turn is often 
doomed to be overshadowed and smothered by 
the pines. When the pine cones tossing in the 
wind at the summits of the great trees open their 
scales to release their ripened seeds, many a juni- 
per is doomed. Each pine seed is furnished with 
a tiny sail, and when the soft winds of Indian 
summer set the pine boughs sighing together, 
you may see myriads of them twinkling against 
the blue like snowflakes in the sun; very slowly 
they settle earthward, finding lodgment at last by 
chance in every conceivable situation. When one 
of them happens to fall among the crowding 
branches of a ground juniper its case might well 
seem hopeless, but the tiny seed sinks through the 
thick foliage to the earth beneath and rests there 
for the winter. In the spring it takes root and 
sends up its pale-green shoots towards the light, 
content with only a few inches growth the first 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

season. A number of seasons may elapse before 
it manages to reach up into the sunlight. Then 
the straight pine stem pushes up ten or twenty 
inches in a summer and with each year's new 
growth spreads out a whorl of slender branches 
thick with clustering pine needles. The pine now 
has the sun and the juniper must take the shadow, 
and soon begins to show thin and sickly foliage, 
lacking sunlight and air. In a comparatively 
short time there will be only its bleached skeleton 
beneath the shadow of the pines, — gnarled and 
twisted branches bereft of foliage and bark and 
half buried in the red pine carpet, but persis- 
tent still, for the wood of the ground juniper, 
like that of the cedar, is almost proof against 
decay. 

Where the white pines spring up thickly, crowd- 
ing each other for room, there is a general struggle 
among them, each striving to overtop all the 
others and get more than its share of sunlight, 
where there cannot possibly be enough for all. 

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THE HOME PASTURE 

Only the strongest may survive, and each season 
a large proportion of them must die. Those that 
live grow up straight and tall, their living foliage 
confined to their topmost branches. Each spring 
slender new shoots start up from the summit of 
last year's growth, while the lower branches die 
from lack of sunlight. The space between the 
stems of the growing pines becomes filled with a 
network of slender dead branches and upright 
poles, the brittle skeletons of those that have died 
in the struggle for existence. In the course of 
years these crumble away and fall from expo- 
sure to the weather, until only the beautiful col- 
umns of the timber pines rise clean and tall with 
their green tops sighing far above the earth, and 
each season's shedding of pine needles spreading 
a thicker carpet over all the unsightly litter of 
fallen branches beneath. Along the borders of 
the woods and in open spaces, each tree has free- 
dom to grow more as it will; the lower branches 
spread and thicken and grow outward in all direc- 

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tions with full, green foliage close down to the 
ground. 

There is a difference of opinion regarding the 
nature of the " old-growth, bull pines or old pas- 
ture pines, " botanists recognizing no distinction 
between them and other white pines, to all in- 
tents and purposes siding with those who claim 
that any white pine, given room enough to grow 
in unrestricted and insured immunity from the axe 
or lightening or other accident of nature, will in 
its own good time grow to be a " bull pine." Cer- 
tainly there is no fixed and recognizable difference 
in the foliage, yet many a pine growing alone 
by itself with conditions apparently all in its favor, 
lives to attain a goodly age without acquiring the 
peculiar character of the bull pine, with its rough, 
deep-furrowed bark and yellow coarse-grained 
wood (as unlike common pine wood as oak from 
hickory) and general air of vigor and never- 
ending growth. I find that the majority of lum- 
bermen and farmers believe that the bull pine is 

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THE HOME PASTURE 

a different tree from the start; that it is the same 
as the " old-growth " pines, that in the days of 
the early settlers, predominated in all the pine 
forests hereabouts, and my own observation leads 
me more and more to agree with them. Spring- 
ing up here and there among the other pines, 
you will find certain individual trees which by 
the time they have reached the height of a man's 
head begin to show the characteristics of yel- 
low wood, and dark colored rough bark extend- 
ing out along the branches. I have watched with 
interest the growth of a number of these in my 
own home pasture and studied them at various 
ages. Even when crowded in upon all sides by 
other trees, their trunks never exhibit that appear- 
ance of smooth green-barked poles so character- 
istic of the common young-growth white pines. 
At first these rough-barked little pines appear to 
make a slower growth than the others, but have 
a way of making room for themselves later, their 
flattened branches elbowing the other trees aside. 

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Undoubtedly these trees would have had a much 
better chance of surviving in those earlier days 
when practically all this region was forest land. 
It is my belief that they are indeed the lingering 
survivals of the original " old-growth " pines of 
which the primeval forest was largely composed, 
and that the " second growth " pine, which 
makes up by far the greater part of our present 
pine woods is merely a variety which has proved 
capable of adapting itself to the changed condi- 
tion of things, as we see them to-day everywhere 
starting up in clearings and taking possession of 
old pastures and abandoned fields. With increas- 
ing years the trunks of the bull pines have a ten- 
dency to straighten themselves in their upward 
growth, but only rarely do we now see the mag- 
nificent " mast pines " towering straight as an 
arrow, two hundred feet and more above the 
earth. 

T know of but two such, one to the north and 
one to the south of Lake Winnipesaukee. Some- 

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THE HOME PASTURE 

times two, or even four or five great branches rise 
towering together to form the head of the tree, 
like the old bull pine in my home pasture, which 
is six feet through the solid wood where the five 
great branches spring out from the main trunk. 
Yet it is still a young-looking tree of rapid 
growth, not having as yet attained the flattened 
summit of maturity, so characteristic of old- 
growth pines, when at last the thickening foliage, 
as if unable to reach higher, masses itself at the 
very top, dark and heavy against the sky. The 
second growth white pine, on reaching a height 
of eighty, or at most one hundred feet, begins to 
show thin and tapering at the top with dying 
foliage. 

Twenty years ago I could see standing up 
against the sky two miles to the southwest of my 
home, the bleached dead trunk of " The Old Look- 
out Pine." For many a generation of mariners 
it had stood a landmark for fishermen coming 
home from the sea, though it was nearly ten 

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MORE LITTLE BEASTS 

miles from the salt water. Until within the last 
fifty years it towered dark and rugged almost 
two hundred and fifty feet above the hills; then 
twice in the same summer it was struck by lighten- 
ing, as if Jove himself had uttered its doom. The 
great top came crashing down into the surround- 
ing forest and only the bare trunk remained stand- 
ing, yet still over-topping the other trees by the 
length of many a goodly log. Now the old trunk 
itself is down and has lain for many seasons 
crumbling beneath the shade of the uprising 
second growth. 

The Old Pine 

O, stormbeat sentinel of olden time ! 

How is thy glory fled ! 
Yet in thine awful ruin still sublime 

Thou standest lone and dead. 

Thy massive trunk all scarred and seamed with 
age. 
Thy giant arms on high, 

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THE HOME PASTURE 

Tho' rent and splintered by the tempests' rage, 
Still pointing to the sky. 

Below, the wreck of all thy former state. 

Lies scattered past recall. 
Time wrought through centuries to make thee great 

And time must work thy fall. 

S. E. C. 



303 



NOV 18 1912 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




005 498 146 6 



